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Page 1: The American Fly Fisher - The Home Of Fly Fishing History · 2016-09-26 · Journal of the American Museum of Fly Fishing The American Fly Fisher(ISSN 0884-3562) is published four

FALL 2006 VOLUME 32 NUMBER 4

American

Journal of the American Museum of Fly Fishing

The

Fly Fisher

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LAMPANYCTUS STEINBECKI. Cygnus bewickii. Both JohnSteinbeck and Thomas Bewick had species named afterthem: Steinbeck a fish, by Rolf Bolin of Stanford

University’s Hopkins Marine Station; and Bewick a swan, bynaturalist William Yarrell. Coincidentally, both Steinbeck andBewick are featured in this issue of the American Fly Fisher, forwhich a species has yet to be named. We remain hopeful.

John Steinbeck may not have been specifically a fly fisher-man, but fishing definitely informed his writing and his life.Ohio University American literature professor Robert DeMotthas written extensively on Steinbeck, for whom, he tells us,“fishing and writing were twin aspects of a similarly attentivelife.” In his article, “Of Fish and Men,” DeMott introduces us tothis Steinbeck by focusing on his fishing, primarily through afew lesser-known essays, as well as a scene from East of Edenand a biographical anecdote. DeMott’s article begins on page 2.

The wood engravings of Thomas Bewick have often gracedthe pages of the American Fly Fisher; in fact, the museum host-ed a Bewick exhibit ten years ago. The wood engraver and nat-uralist was author and illustrator of the classics A GeneralHistory of Quadrupeds and A History of British Birds. He diedbefore the completion of A History of British Fishes, but he didproduce several fish engravings and angling scenes in prepara-tion for its publication. Many of these can be found in AMemoir of Thomas Bewick written by Himself, published

posthumously in 1862. J. Keith Harwood, in “Thomas Bewick:Artist and Angler” (page 16), provides us with some facts of thisman’s life: his childhood, his journey into the world of engrav-ing, and his general love of nature—which included fishing.

Rhodes S. Baker, a prominent Dallas attorney at the turn ofthe twentieth century, had a son and a grandson named afterhim. His grandson, Rhodes S. Baker III, has done a littleresearch into his grandfather’s interesting past. Seems thatRhodes III found an old scrapbook that belonged to Rhodes I.In it, Rhodes I—clearly a multisport adventurer—described abicycling/fly-fishing adventure from 1896, a twelve-day trip of425 miles from West Texas into Mexico. Rhodes III recreates abit of this adventure for us in “Echoes from Yesteryear” (page 12)by sharing a few of his grandfather’s letters as well as newspa-per accounts of some of Baker’s cycling exploits with friendF. G. Allen. He also makes note of some of the real-life charac-ters the two may have encountered along that route.

It’s with sadness that we note the passing of former TrusteeBill Barrett. His friend and fellow Trustee Bill Herrick paystribute to him on page 23.

And now, I’m off to catch and name something.

KATHLEEN ACHOREDITOR

Lampanyctus steinbecki. Illustration by Rolf L. Bolin. From Rolf L. Bolin, “A Reviewof the Myctophid Fishes of the Pacific Coast of the United States and of Lower

California,” Stanford Ichthyological Bulletin (1939, vol. 1, no. 4), 89–156.“Of Fish and Men,” Robert DeMott’s article about John Steinbeck, begins on page 2.

Namesakes

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Executive DirectorCollections Manager

Administration & Membership Art Director

Account Manager

William C. Bullock IIIYoshi AkiyamaRebecca NawrathSara WilcoxPatricia Russell

Of Fish and Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Robert DeMott

Echoes from Yesteryear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12Rhodes S. Baker III

Thomas Bewick: Artist and Angler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16J. Keith Harwood

Museum News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

In Memoriam: William Michael Barrett . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Letter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

ON THE COVER: From Thomas Bewick, Bewick’s Select Fables of Æsop andOthers (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1871), 58.

F A L L 2 0 0 6 VO L U M E 3 2 N U M B E R 4

the American Museum of Fly FishingJournal of

The American Fly Fisher (ISSN 0884-3562) is published

four times a year by the museum at P.O. Box 42, Manchester, Vermont 05254.

Publication dates are winter, spring, summer, and fall. Membership dues include the cost of the

journal ($15) and are tax deductible as provided for by law. Membership rates are listed in the back of each issue.

All letters, manuscripts, photographs, and materials intended for publication in the journal should be sent to

the museum. The museum and journal are not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts, drawings, photographic

material, or memorabilia. The museum cannot accept responsibility for statements and interpretations that are

wholly the author’s. Unsolicited manuscripts cannot be returned unless postage is provided. Contributions to The

American Fly Fisher are to be considered gratuitous and the property of the museum unless otherwise requested

by the contributor. Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America:

History and Life. Copyright © 2006, the American Museum of Fly Fishing, Manchester, Vermont 05254. Original

material appearing may not be reprinted without prior permission. Periodical postage paid at

Manchester, Vermont 05254 and additional offices (USPS 057410). The American Fly Fisher (ISSN 0884-3562)

EMAIL: [email protected] WEBSITE: www.amff.com

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The American Fly Fisher, P.O. Box 42, Manchester, Vermont 05254.

THE AMERICAN MUSEUMOF FLY FISHING

Preserving the Heritageof Fly Fishing

E. M. BakwinMichael Bakwin

Foster BamPamela Bates

Steven BenardetePaul Bofinger

Duke Buchan IIIMickey Callanen

Peter CorbinJerome C. DayBlake Drexler

Christopher GarciaRonald Gard

George R. Gibson IIIGardner L. Grant

Chris GrusekeJames HardmanJames Heckman

Lynn L. Hitschler Arthur Kaemmer, MD

Woods King IIICarl R. Kuehner IIINancy MackinnonWalter T. MatiaWilliam C. McMaster, MDJames MirendaJohn MundtDavid NicholsWayne NordbergRaymond C. PecorStephen M. PeetLeigh H. PerkinsJohn RanoRoger RiccardiKristoph J. RollenhagenWilliam SalladinRobert G. ScottRichard G. TischDavid H. WalshJames C. Woods

Chairman of the BoardPresident

Vice Presidents

TreasurerSecretary

Clerk

Robert G. ScottNancy MackinnonGeorge R. Gibson IIILynn L. HitschlerStephen M. PeetDavid H. WalshJames MirendaJames C. WoodsCharles R. Eichel

O F F I C E R S

T R U S T E E S

S T A F F

EditorDesign & Production

Copy Editor

Kathleen AchorSara WilcoxSarah May Clarkson

THE AMERICAN FLY FISHER

We welcome contributions to the American Fly Fisher. Before making a submission,please review our Contributor’s Guidelines on our website (www.amff.com), orwrite to request a copy. The museum cannot accept responsibility for statementsand interpretations that are wholly the author’s.

Paul Schullery

T R U S T E E S E M E R I T ICharles R. Eichel

G. Dick FinlayW. Michael Fitzgerald

William Herrick

Robert N. JohnsonDavid B. LedlieLeon L. MartuchKeith C. Russell

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2 THE AMERICAN FLY FISHER

NOBEL PRIZE–WINNING novelistJohn Steinbeck (1902–1968) didnot habitually employ traditional

fly-fishing methods. There has been nosudden enlightenment on that score, inthe way that historian Hal Wert recentlyrevealed the heretofore untold depths ofPresident Herbert Hoover’s fly-fishingfanaticism in Hoover: The Fishing Pres-ident (Stackpole Books, 2005)—a fanati-cism, by the way, not fully discernible byreading Hoover’s somewhat whimsical,offhand musings in Fishing for Fun and toWash Your Soul (Random House, 1963).Nevertheless, Steinbeck was an avidthough quirky amateur angler, who gen-erally favored the means more than the

ends of fishing. He fished, according tohis youngest son, the late John SteinbeckIV, because “. . . this alliance between fishand fisherman, even the so-called thrillof the chase, was not really the reason orpoint of . . . his almost daily endeavor.Basically it was . . . a fine and elaboratelyfeudal style of daydreaming.”1 ThoughSteinbeck once opined that no politicalcandidate “would think of running forpublic office without first catching andbeing photographed with a fish,”2 ironi-cally his attitude resembled PresidentHoover’s, who believed that “[f]ishing isnot so much getting fish as it is a state ofmind and a lure for the human soul intorefreshment.”3

Steinbeck enjoyed catching gamefish—from trout during the 1920s whenhe was living at Lake Tahoe to bluefishand striped bass during the late 1950sand 1960s when he summered on easternLong Island. But he was also utterly con-tent to eschew the role of know-it-allangling expert—so much so, in fact, thatJohn IV considered it “great stuff” when

he “learned how little [his father] caredabout being a good” fisherman.4 Rather,Steinbeck seemed comfortable with theparadoxes and complexities of the anglinglife and considered fishing variously on acontinuum from food gathering to exis-tential play to private therapy to quasi-sacred calling. In 1927 and 1928, when helived at Lake Tahoe, he often landedtrout by necessity for dinner (by whatmethod he does not say): “I caught a ninepound trout last night. The fish com-missioner doesn’t mind if we who livehere catch them for food. . . . Lord what afight he put up. Pulled me clear into thelake once. He will last a week.”5 A decadelater, according to Thom, his eldest son,whimsical Steinbeck placed a large pieceof broken mirror in a mountain streamnear Los Gatos so that the stream’s singleresident—a small trout—on seeing hisown image would not feel lonely.6

Steinbeck is in good company amongAmerican writers—novelists and poets inparticular—who have not only been ded-icated anglers but have written tellingly

This essay is a revised version of a talk given atthe twenty-fifth anniversary Steinbeck Festival atthe National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, California,6 August 2005. My thanks to Amanda Holder,Nick Lyons, Paul Schullery, Susan Shillinglaw, andThom Steinbeck for their support and encourage-ment. This essay is dedicated to Jack Benson,scholar extraordinaire, fly-fishing gentleman, andvalued friend. —RD

Of Fish and Menby Robert DeMott

O Sir, doubt not but that Angling is an art; is it not anart to deceive a Trout with an artificial fly?

! Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler

. . .any man who pits his intelligence against a fish andloses has it coming. . .

! John Steinbeck, “On Fishing”John Steinbeck. Photo courtesy of Department of Special

Collections, Stanford University Libraries. Used with permission.

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FALL 2006 3

about the sport in and out of their art.Steinbeck is in the company of obviousfigures such as Washington Irving, HenryDavid Thoreau, John Burroughs, ZaneGrey, and Ernest Hemingway, but alsoless widely canonized contemporaries,such as the late Richard Brautigan,Raymond Carver, John Hersey, RichardHugo, William Humphrey, Louis Owens,and Robert Traver (aka John D. Voelker),as well as other anglers still alive andcasting: Bill Barich, Anthony Doerr,David James Duncan, John Engels, CarlHiassen, Jim Harrison, Pam Houston,Greg Keeler, Tom McGuane, John Nichols,Craig Nova, Frank Soos, and W. D.Wetherell. All of them have givenus impressive examples of fishing’smarriage with excellent writingand the realization that, as JimHarrison told me between castson the Yellowstone River, “ . . . it’sno easier to write well about fish-ing than it is about anythingelse.”7 “Writing and fishing,”Mark Kingwell claims in his niftylittle treatise Catch and Release,“share this transcendental abilityto heal the breach betweenthought and deed, to bridge theworld of imagination and the so-called ‘real’ one.”8 For Steinbeck,fishing and writing were twinaspects of a similarly attentive life.

READING THE WATER

Anglers have a phrase—“read-ing the water”—that is our versionof the overland traveler’s desire todiscern the “lay of the land.” Itmeans observing carefully the sub-tleties and nuances of current andflow in rivers, streams, lakes, estu-aries, etc., to figure out whatpredator/prey action is occurringand where the fish—all of whomare finely honed opportunisticfeeders—are most likely to bewaiting for their next meal, whichof course you hope will be the fly, lure, orbait you have on the end of your line thatparticular day. Reading the water is learn-ing the language of rivers: “River readingis creative reading,” Mark Browningclaims.9 In a sense, then, all water is a“text” begging to be interpreted, and fish-ermen are really critics who participate inan ongoing yet indeterminate hermeneu-tic process. Or better yet, all critics andwriters are fishers, or fishing guides, try-ing to puzzle out methods of hookingthat will produce best results. Puzzlingthings out is often satisfying enough,because as anglers, when do we everreceive the tangible rewards we expect orthink we truly deserve?

I have long been a proponent ofSteinbeck’s occasional pieces.10 His out-of-the-way texts provide interesting,unique, neglected, and fruitful (andsometimes unguarded) approaches tohis literary preoccupations, and theyreveal facets of his writing life oftenunremarked on by most critics and read-ers. To put it another way: I like anglingin Steinbeck’s offbeat texts, and in thatvein, I approach this somewhat fancifuland admittedly elliptical and digressivetopic, “Of Fish and Men,” not by focus-ing on Steinbeck’s obvious mainstreamworks, but on some less prominent sidechannels in his art and life: a relatively

neglected scene from one of his other-wise most famous novels, East of Eden(1952); a biographical anecdote recordedby Graham Watson (1980); and a coupleof tongue-in-cheek nonfiction essayscalled “On Fishing” (1954) and “Then MyArm Glassed Up” (1965), in which anglingpursuits play a strong role. I use some ofthe common and more or less nontech-nical elements and lingo of fly fishing toprovide explanatory context for a few ofSteinbeck’s short, unheralded fishingtexts. This essay, then, may be consideredan unabashed fishing expedition, per-haps best thought of as a “meandering”one at that, to steal a crucial metaphorfrom Ted Leeson’s Jerusalem Creek, one

of the finest fly-fishing memoirs everwritten.11

SOME FISH TO REMEMBER,SOME FISH TO FORGET

John Steinbeck was a fisherman. Imean that in the most honorable, as wellas the most capacious, sense of thatword. According to his definitive biogra-pher, Steinbeck developed from child-hood a “particular affinity for the sea-shore,”12 and although you don’t neces-sarily have to be a fisherman to lovewater, it does help. Steinbeck not onlyloved all manner of fresh- and saltwater

bodies of water—swamps, springs,streams, creeks, brooks, rivers,lakes, sloughs, tide pools, estuar-ies, oceans—but he also prized themyriad live finny things thatinhabited the depths of livingwater. Steinbeck, who was wellversed in Jungian psychology,13

understood the implications ofwater’s primal archetypal rela-tionship to the human uncon-scious—a mythic, elemental, andsymbolic relatedness evidentthroughout his fictive work fromCup of Gold in 1929 to The Winterof Our Discontent in 1961. But healso understood water’s commod-ity value and the dangers faced bycommercial working fishermenwho harvest the fish we need forour insatiable appetites.

More than that, John Steinbeckappreciated the ecological impor-tance of bodies of water in thevast web of planetary biodiversityand how humans are but a smallpart of an endless linked chain ofspecies. His work with marinebiologist Edward F. Ricketts on Seaof Cortez is a monumental lovesong to piscatorial interspeciesrelatedness that has proven uncan-nily prophetic in its deep ecologi-cal message. In fact, Sea of Cortez

was his favorite book, the one he wasproudest to have written. Besides itsmany virtues, it is a text in which waterand aquatic creatures are main charac-ters, highlighted by a prescient holisticvision.

Steinbeck certainly knew (to para-phrase Thoreau) that in angling, it ismore than fish we seek; like Thoreau(and Christ before him), he was a fisherof (wo)men. In Upland Stream, W. D.Wetherell lists thirteen reasons whyhuman beings fish,14 but the fact is weprobably do it for a hundred other dif-ferent reasons too, and my guess is that,among them, Steinbeck loved the inti-mate process of fishing, the simple rituals

Cover of East of Eden by John Steinbeck.(New York: Penguin, 2006).

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4 THE AMERICAN FLY FISHER

and preparations associated with the act,the tactileness and physicality of theequipment, the freedom and challenge ofbeing on or near the water, the rush andsense of well-being that came from doingsomething for himself outside hisworkaday routine. Recreational fishingor boating was a form of therapy forSteinbeck, who considered Gardiner’sBay off his Bluff Point summer home inSag Harbor, at the eastern end of LongIsland, as healing waters. Water gazingand its manifold concomitant activitiescreated a respite from daily obligationsand imposed deadlines and duties, a mas-culine sphere of retreat and introspectionin which he recharged himself.

I love a certain kind of fish-ing above all other so-called sports. It is almostthe last remaining way for aman to be alone, withoutbeing suspected of somesecret sin. By fishing with-out bait it is even possibleto avoid being disturbed byfish. I am surprised that thedour brotherhood of psy-choanalysts has not attackedfishing, since it seems to meit is in competition. Twohours with a fishing rod isworth ten hours on thecouch.15

In Steinbeck, as inMelville’s Ishmael, waterand meditation seemedtruly wedded. Which is tosay that, in an analogoussense, fishing was akin towriting, because Steinbeckconsidered both to requireno other justification thanbeing downright pleasur-able. Freudian implicationsaside, in addition to thefact that both occupations require along, hard instrument—pencil or fishingrod—they also require imagination, dis-cipline, observation, problem solving,patience, and contemplation. A com-ment by Nick Lyons, arguably our era’smost influential and literary fly-fishingauthor and publisher, is especially ger-mane here: “Writing about fishing . . .multiplied the pleasure I’d always takenfrom fishing; I now had the thing itselfand then the thing I’d made on paper.”16

Fishing, like writing, thrives on memory,because as soon as a writer records his orher fishing experiences (or any experi-ences for that matter), they are alreadypast, already part of mythic anglingmemory, and therefore given to selec-tion, enlargement, exaggeration, embroi-dery, distortion, and even fantasy—all ofthe elements that complicate representa-

tion. “We do well to remember,” OdellShepard writes, “how memory andimagination work together in addingounces and inches . . . to the fish of yes-teryear.”17

In fact, in the popular imagination,fishermen, like writers, are consideredliars, susceptible to what novelist CraigNova in his spare but deliciously evoca-tive book Brook Trout and the WritingLife, says is a propensity for “otherwiseunbelievable stories.”18 Writing, MarkKingwell claims, is “an activity thatshares with angling and philosophy thequalities of solitude, quixotic dedication,addiction, momentary apparent point-lessness, and sheer dumb luck. And of

course fabrication.”19 Fanatical politi-cians, know-it-all pundits, and televisiontalking heads aside, stretching certainareas of literary truth is probably notsuch a bad thing. As Steinbeck toldProfessor C. N. Mackinnon in 1939, “I’lllie—not because I want to lie, butbecause I can’t remember what is trueand what isn’t.”20 To fish and to write,then, is to lie. “The truth is,” Judge JohnVoelker (whose pen name was RobertTraver) says in Anatomy of a Fisherman,“fishermen scheme and lie. . . .”21

These truth-bending elements cometogether in a moving and lyrical scene inchapter 23 of East of Eden, Steinbeck’sfictionalized reminiscence of a fishingexcursion in his youth with his mother’sbrother, his Uncle Thomas Hamilton.(Steinbeck does not say how old a childhe was, but because Tom Hamilton died

in 1912, John would have to have been avery impressionable eight years old oryounger.) He wrote this chapter in June1951, soon after he and his family hadremoved from their home in Manhattan(where he had written the previoustwenty-two chapters) to a vacation rentalhouse on a wind-swept coastal bluff inSiasconsett, on the island of Nantucket,where, as he said in his posthumouscompanion text, Journal of a Novel, theirdaily routine included “fishing.”22

It strikes me as more than coinciden-tal that as soon as Steinbeck entered awater-bound environment, one of hisfirst compositional acts was to writeabout fishing. “What I know about,”

Steinbeck writes in chapter23, “will be the result ofmemory plus what I knowto be true plus conjecturebuilt on the combination.Who knows whether it willbe correct?”23 Indeed, thisstatement works on bothsmall and large levels toencapsulate one of the mainthemes of his most personalnovel. In addition to expos-ing the inherent imprecise-ness of memory, his state-ment is a commentary onthe slippery nature of ele-giac prose. Where doestruth reside? The child’s ex-perience is immediate, buthe lacks the full dimensionsof language to define itfully; the adult has the req-uisite language capacity toreconstruct the past, but indoing so—no matter howgraphically the past is recol-lected—the experience in-evitably owes more to so-phisticated language than to

raw, unmediated reality.In other words, this dilemma is the

fisherman’s domain—the space wherepersonal memory, factual experience,alleged falsehood, and language skillsmix and mingle. The combination—theresult of Steinbeck’s angle on reality—leads us to a storied truth, which in thiscase is the ineluctable truth of narrative.“In the end it is all about stories,” TedLeeson says succinctly.24 To put it anoth-er way, the river that runs through it, à laNorman Maclean, is language and mem-ory as much as it is water and fish. Nomatter how we cut it, Steve Raymondclaims, “[W]ords define the essence ofthe sport.”25 As writer and angler, Stein-beck, I believe, understood this indivisi-ble linkage very well, for which thisneglected scene in East of Eden is atouchstone.

Steinbeck bust on Cannery Row. Photo from the National Oceanicand Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce.

Captain Albert E. Theberge, NOAA Corps (ret.)

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FALL 2006 5

In East of Eden, “Sometimes Tom tookme fishing,” Steinbeck declares.

We started before the sun came up anddrove in the rig straight towardFremont’s Peak, and as we neared themountains the stars would pale out andthe light would rise to blacken themountains. . . . I don’t remember thatTom talked. Now that I think of it, Ican’t remember the sound of his voiceor the kind of words he used. I canremember both about my grandfather,but when I think of Tom it is amemory of a kind of warmsilence. Maybe he didn’t talkat all. Tom had beautifultackle and made his own flies.But he didn’t seem to carewhether we caught trout ornot. He needed not to tri-umph over animals.26 [myemphasis]

Steinbeck continues:

I remember the five-fingeredferns growing under the lit-tle waterfalls, bobbing theirgreen fingers as the dropletsstruck them. And I remem-ber the smells of the hills,wild azaleas and a very dis-tant skunk and the sweetcloy of lupin and horse sweaton harness. I remember thesweeping lovely dance ofhigh buzzards against thesky and Tom looking longup at them, but I can’tremember that he ever saidanything about them. . . . Iremember the smell ofcrushed ferns in the creeland the delicate sweet odorof fresh damp rainbow troutlying so prettily on the greenbed.27

This patently nostalgicscene is an elegy for a long-lost person, place, and wayof life, and as such—poten-tially fuzzy sentimentsaside—it functions as a pri-vate origin myth (which iswhat most fly-fishing mem-oirs are). It is a momentfrozen in time, a generative moment,born out of a certain kind of remem-bered reflective silence, a fisherman’ssilence, the kind of idyllic pastoral reposethat Izaak Walton claimed more than 350years ago complemented “contemplationand quietness,”28 two of the angler’s mostdesirable attributes.

Thus this scene in chapter 23 of East ofEden is a small yet sharply etched por-trait of the beginnings of Steinbeck’s life-long involvement with fishing (not ex-clusively fly fishing) as a physical and phil-

osophical adventure, his incipient fasci-nation with its material allure and thing-ness, and by extension, his long-buriedrelatedness (and perhaps indebtedness)to his favorite uncle, Tom Hamilton, oneof the least visible of the Hamilton clan,who was a skilled fisherman and adept atfly tying (a nonmechanized, throwbackcraft that requires observation, preci-sion, dexterity, attention to minute de-tails, and a correspondingly steady hand).Moreover, as we learn later in chapter 23,

Tom was also a “secret” poet,29 an anglerof words.

The writing fisherman, the fishingwriter: Uncle Tom’s “artistic” influenceand example may have been far greateron his famous nephew’s habits of beingthan has yet been calculated. And thoughthe scene ends with a basket of deadrainbow trout (perhaps foreshadowingTom’s suicide ten chapters later), theirbodies seem less to be tangible trophiesof the outing than accidental by-prod-ucts, which is to say that they are but a

tiny part of the overall “catch.” The pas-sage is lyrical and painterly (as much fly-fishing writing tends to be): it is note-worthy for its textured density and theway Steinbeck, like our best fishingmemoirists (Christopher Camuto, LorianHemingway, Ted Leeson, Nick Lyons,Harry Middleton, Howell Raines, andPaul Schullery, to name just a few), em-beds the angling moment in a contextu-al surround, a thickly descriptive swirl ofsights, odors, objects, physical gestures

and processes, shaded interplayof light and dark, and sharp,

discriminating insights, allof which occur in a strikinggeographic setting that atonce triggers and frames thememory/experience.

Political correctness aside,the dead rainbow trout inEast of Eden, like the troutNick Adams lands in ErnestHemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” seem to bethe least important part ofthe equation, and to missthat is to miss the waySteinbeck is honoring thegift of trout as a kind ofblessing. Craig Nova speaksfor many anglers when hesays of his own experience,“These fish are forever asso-ciated in my mind with thedepths of thankfulness forgood fortune, just as theyalways reminded me ofbeauty and a sense of whatmay be possible after all.”30

In Steinbeck’s case, themomentary spot of time wasmade possible as much byTom Hamilton’s generosity,noncompetitive nature, andwarm silence as it was by theunequivocally painful knowl-edge that those attributescould not save Tom fromhimself, from his own de-pression and self-destruc-tion. In the wake of Tom’s lit-eral and metaphorical silences(they too are part of the sur-

rounding emotional experience), autho-rial and readerly interpretation flourish-es and leads to a promise of redemptionand a sense of being-in-the-world thatSteinbeck never abandoned. Steinbeck’sfly-fishing story—a twist on the old taleof “the one that got away”—keeps his unclealive. In constituting Tom Hamilton’ssubjecthood via his fly-fishing passion,Steinbeck was fashioning part of himselfas well and creating an artful legacy forhis own sons, Thom and John IV, forwhom the original version of the novel

John Steinbeck and his son, John Steinbeck IV, fish off a dock in thisca. mid-1960s family photo. Courtesy of Department of Special

Collections, Stanford University Libraries. Used with permission.

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6 THE AMERICAN FLY FISHER

was intentionally written, and who botheventually did their share of fishing andwriting.

STEINBECK AND I SHOP ATTHE HOUSE OF HARDY

In his wonderfully diverting memoir,Book Society, Graham Watson, Steinbeck’sBritish literary agent, recalls their firstmeeting in 1952. While their wives shoppedin Bond Street, Graham and John “re-paired to Hardy’s—always his mostimportant call in London” [my empha-sis], where Steinbeck “bought a ratherridiculous fishing hat covered in salmonflies . . .”31 The House of Hardy, foundedin 1879 and headquartered in Alnwick,England, is the premier fishing tacklemanufacturer in the British Isles.

Along with America’s Orvis Company(founded in 1856), the House of Hardy isconsidered one of the best—and mostvenerable—makers of fine rods and reelsin the world. Hardy’s seductive shop inPall Mall is a required stop for fly-fishingand outdoor aficionados and sportingenthusiasts from around the world, andSteinbeck was not only a frequent visitorto the store but also conversant with thesporting tradition it embodied. EdwardWeeks, essayist and longtime editor ofAtlantic Monthly, notes in Fresh Waters, hisgenteel book of fishing essays,“Hardy’s isthe cornucopia of English angling; theshop is run with a quiet air of authorityand it has everything . . . from . . . bigSalmon flies . . . [to] . . . the latest word infishing hats and waterproofs.”32

England is the birthplace of modernfly fishing, a tradition of artful skill thathas been written about continuously formore than five hundred years, fromDame Juliana Berners’s 1496 A Treatyse ofFysshynge wyth an Angle (included inThe Book of St. Albans), through IzaakWalton’s Compleat Angler, especially thefifth edition of 1676 (which includes afly-fishing section penned by CharlesCotton), and thence on to the reforma-tive writings of Frederic Halford, G. E. M.Skues, and many others in the mid- andlate-nineteenth and early-twentieth cen-turies, and extending on from there viaJohn Waller Hills, Frank Sawyer, and ahost of others into our own time.33 TheBrits cornered the market in expoundingtheir country’s glories and traditions as afishable nation. In fact, the “British style”of fly fishing for trout (as it may beloosely called) is essentially an upper-class, genteel tradition because it is notonly elitist (the only proper quarry aretrout and salmon; other species are con-sidered “coarse” or “rough”), but alsohighly structured, code regulated, andprotocol driven. This was especially true

in fly fishing as it was promulgatedaround the turn of the twentieth centuryon the private gin-clear limestone chalkstreams of southern England’s HampshireCounty—for instance, the highly groomedand manicured Rivers Test and Itchen—by purists such as Frederic Halford andhis fellow members and cronies whobelonged to the exclusive HoughtonClub (limited to twenty-two members)and to the Flyfishers’ Club of London. Arather imperious innovator, Halfordcodified in Floating Flies and How toDress Them and Dry-Fly Fishing inTheory and Practice the practice of cast-ing a floating imitative dry fly upstreamto rising trout that were dining on hatch-ing winged insects. This came to be con-sidered the only thoroughly sporting andethical way of presenting a fly, andsoon—for a brief span anyway—themethod became fly fishing’s version ofHigh Church “gospel” truth.34

Novelist W. D. Wetherell calls Hardy’sshop in Pall Mall “the snobbiest fishingstore in the world.”35 Having visited it acouple of times myself, I can testify thatto walk into Hardy’s, with its hushed airof understated luxury and its somewhatcondescending but very informed salesstaff, is to glimpse, as iffrom the outside look-ing in, the world of whatHowell Raines calls the“Tweedy Gent.”36 This isthe sphere of privilegedBritish country sport-ing life that the storesimultaneously catersto and characterizes.The House of Hardyexudes an aura of gen-tility, upper-class insu-larity, earnest leisure-liness, and confidentknowingness, but hasnot succumbed to thegonzo level of pro spe-cialization fostered nowin American magazinessuch as Wild on the Flyand Fish and Fly, whichcater to globe-trottingfly-rod extremists—thesport’s “new paradigms,”as novelist Tom McGuane(himself a world-classangler) calls them in hisbrilliant collection TheLongest Silence—“thebum, the addict, andthe maniac.”37 Rather,Hardy’s more subduedimage is symbolized byan advertising campaignfeaturing the mysteri-ous, fetching, fresh-

faced, red-haired “Hardy girl,” as she hascome to be known in the sportingpress.38

Alluring Miss Hardy Girl aside, few ofus have the social standing or financialresources to feel completely at ease insuch an intimidating environment or toacquire its accouterment with guiltlessabandon. Indeed, class does matter:many years ago, as a financially strait-ened junior professor, not too long outof graduate school and with a family tosupport, I recall being cowed by theprices of Hardy’s rods and reels, and lefttheir Pall Mall store (which took me halfa day to find) feeling deflated because Iwas only able to afford in good con-science an insignia baseball cap and a fewbucks worth of flies, including a wet-flypattern called Coch-Y-Bondu, one ofHemingway’s go-to flies (I confess tonever having tried them) when he fishedthe Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone Riverat Lawrence Nordquist’s L–T Ranch inWyoming in the 1930s.39 I also picked outhalf a dozen high-floating dry flies of apattern called Tups Indispensable (thename alone was irresistible to me), a ver-satile English pattern developed around1900 by R. S. Austin but given its catchy

Cover of the 1952 Hardy Bros. Ltd. catalog.

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moniker by G. E. M. Skues.40 Anyway, tocarry this willful digression from thesublime all the way to the ridiculous, theTups Indispensable was traditionally tiedwith urine-stained wool from a ram’sgenitals, not exactly an easy ingredientfor commoners to lay hands on nowa-days, as Gordon Wickstrom notes.41 Mymodernized versions, tied parachutestyle, turned out to be effective on cut-throat and rainbow trout feeding onEpeorus albertae, so I suppose my firstpilgrimage to Hardy’s, like Steinbeck’sdecades earlier (which I will get to short-ly), paid unforeseen, though not nearly socomic or incisive, cultural dividends afterall. At the very least, I learned somethingabout the universal currency of mayflies.

For neo-Marxists in the crowd, beforeattacking Steinbeck for “going Hardy”and selling out, however, we shouldremember that, like many anglers whoenter what Jan Zita Grover calls “the Cultof Stuff” in her captivating book onbecoming a fly fisher,42 it is helpful torecall that our old left-wing proletariannovelist was actually a gearhead. ShirleyFisher, one of Steinbeck’s literary agents,longtime friend, and boon fishing com-panion, wrote in a lively reminiscencethat “John loved tools.”43 Indeed, Stein-beck was fascinated by and owned allkinds of useful or exotic mechanicalimplements, gadgets, and conveyances(typewriters, dictaphones, Abercrombie& Fitch marine cannons, outboardmotors, boats, Land Rovers, and more),as well as sporting paraphernalia and ma-terials, and he especially reveled in suit-able raiment. Graham Watson recalls, forinstance, that Steinbeck “loved acquiringsports clothes and no London visit wouldpass without his buying a new yachtingcap or a pair of shooting boots or a heavymacintosh,”44 whether or not he actuallyused those items for sporting purposeson a regular basis. Witness again the fish-ing hat festooned with salmon flies.

Salmon flies of the mid-nineteenthcentury and well into the twentieth cen-tury were often extremely colorful andextravagantly dressed; whatever theirpotential utility, they resemble miniature

hand-painted, but some-what overly stuffed andbusy, Victorian artworks.Andrew Herd calls thesefanatically appointed, over-the-top feather creations“gaudy” flies.45 The art ofthe salmon fly, or rather,the salmon fly as art: asfetish objects, they are per-haps more attractive to thefisherman and/or collectorthan they are to the fish,but then that is the point,

as tackle manufacturers and purveyorsdiscovered long ago. Nevertheless, even ifSteinbeck’s cache of salmon flies were ofthe plainer, less flashy, hair-bodied styletypical of the mid-twentieth century andbeyond, it isn’t hard to see why the nov-elist might have been so fascinated bytheir intricate designs, their provenanceand history, and, because he was ono-mastic, their catchy names: Silver Doctor,Stoat’s Tail, Thunder and Lightning,Greenwell’s Glory, General Practitioner. Itwould be misleading, then, to argue thatSteinbeck’s adherence to a dyed-in-the-wool British sporting tradition markedhis capitulation to elite capitalism ormarked him as an effete poseur. Fly fish-ing for trout and salmon is a pricey mat-ter, but Steinbeck’s view of the fishing lifeis too varied and complex for such areductive assessment. On one level,Steinbeck’s purchase of the salmon fly–adorned hat may be considered anhomage to careful artisanship and con-nects thematically with the scene in Eastof Eden I spoke of above, and with thespirit of his long-dead Uncle TomHamilton, who valued authentic, one-of-a-kind items.46

Or to put it another way: the old adagethat you get what you pay for is true. Ireceived a Hardy LRH single-action flyreel as a Christmas gift in 1968, and I haveused it continuously for four decadeswithout its ever requiring repair or facto-ry service. Hardy now makes a numberof sexier, more technologically advancedfly reels, including the recently intro-duced, much-hyped Angel, but the old-timey retro Lightweight series—of whichthe LRH is one—is still in production,still available from some, but not all,American fly-fishing tackle shops, such asDan Bailey’s in Livingston, Montana.Given the LRH’s fixed rim and outmod-ed “cage”-style design (which makespalming the spool impossible, andchanging spools a bit tricky, especially inthe dark), the reel seems ridiculouslyoverpriced at $325 (the price of historyand tradition, I guess), but its simplicityand bulldog reliability, which defy obso-lescence, remain its chief attractions. No

mention of its tactile appeal would becomplete, however, without noting thedelightful ratchet noise—somewherebetween a shriek and an aggravatedclick—the reel makes when its handle iscranked to turn the spool and retrieveline. (These days, some advanced, high-end fly reels are silent.) The LRH’s reas-suring on-stream racket always gives theimpression of being linked one-to-oneto something immediate and real (par-don the pun), especially in the rare,unforgettable moments when the clatteris set in motion by a fast fish making astrong run.

In fact, thinking about my well-trav-eled fly reel, I have come to realize thatno matter what other motives Steinbeckmay have had for his frequent priorityvisits to Hardy’s, he certainly understoodand appreciated the quality of theirtrademark gear, as did Ernest Hem-ingway, who owned a substantial amountof Hardy equipment until most of it waslost in transit to Sun Valley in 1940.47

THE OUTDOOR INDOORSPORT: WATCHING OTHER

PEOPLE FISH

Far from being an example of untrou-bled materialism, I suggest that theHouse of Hardy episode has deeperimport, for in the middle of one of theworld’s largest, densest urban areas, farfrom the nearest wild salmon river(whether in London or in New York), theflies’ eventual use—other than theirobvious ornamental, aesthetic, and cere-monial value—led Steinbeck indirectlyto a kind of reductio ad absurdam, a cul-tural satire of sorts, the kind of broadlycomic (and occasionally self-deprecating)angle toward popular sporting and athlet-ic pursuits he struck in his 1965 SportsIllustrated piece, “Then My Arm GlassedUp,” when he quipped:“And it has seemedto me that a man who can outthink fishmay have a great future, but it will be lim-ited to fish. His acquired knowledge willdo him little good at a Sunday-school pic-nic or a board meeting.”48

Steinbeck wrote about fishing—metaphorically, anyway—in all his books(he was, after all, a fisher of men andwomen who has managed to hook aworldwide audience), but he also penned acouple of savvy and humorous nonfictionpieces in which fishing is prominent. Iwant to dally over “On Fishing,” in whichSteinbeck boasts he is “one of the world’sforemost observers of other people’sfishing,” and continues: “I believe thatcertain national characteristics emerge infishing and attitudes toward fishing. Withthis in view I have for many years studiedthe relationship of fisherman to fish.”49

The Tups Indispensable, a noted English pattern namedby G. E. M. Skues. Tied by Gordon M. Wickstrom.

Cook Nielson

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This is an intriguing and resonantessay, which anatomizes in a very broadand playful way American, British, andFrench attitudes toward fishing. I’ll startwith Steinbeck’s waggish take on theBritish, which I think puts a differentspin on his Anglophilia and the House ofHardy episode. In short, like Twain in thelighter moments of A Connecticut Yankeein King Arthur’s Court (1889), Steinbeckbeards the lion (or rather the trout),goofs with an elite tradition, signifies onwhat he called the “English passion forprivate property,” which, based onBritain’s eighteenth-century EnclosureActs (designed to privatize commonlands), “rises to its greatest glory in theownership and negotiability of exclusivefishing rights in rivers and streams.”50

The free-range Yank democrat thenspins his version of “the ideal Britishfishing story,” based on a set of “gentle-manly rules of conduct set up betweentrout and Englishmen,” in which “thefisherman rereads Izaak Walton to brushup on his philosophic background,smokes many pipes, reduces all languageto a series of grunts and finally sets out ofan evening to have a go at Old George,” anancient and brilliant trout that hasresided many years in a nearby meadowstream. Steinbeck continues:

He creeps near to the sunken log anddrops his badly tied dry fly upstream ofthe log so that it will float practicallyinto Old George’s mouth. This has beenhappening to Old George every eveningfor ten or fifteen years. But one eveningperhaps Old George is sleeping with hismouth open or maybe he is bored. Thehook gets entangled in his mouth. Thenthe fisherman, with tears streaming fromhis eyes, pulls Old George out on thegrassy bank. There with full militaryhonors and a deep sense of sorrow fromthe whole community, Old George flopsto his death. The fisherman eats Georgeboiled with brussels sprouts, sews a blackband on his arm and gains the power ofspeech sufficiently to bore the hell out ofthe local pub for years to come.51

This fanciful little tale is a savvy send-up on one aspect of the storied and hoity-toity British tradition of blood sports andfly fishing, which the House of Hardy rep-resents and which Steinbeck suggests hadalready, by the middle of the twentiethcentury, entered the nether universe ofcultural stereotype and parody.

But it isn’t just the British who comein for a hooking; the Americans, too, gettheir comeuppance, and in fact, Stein-beck is especially hard on his fellowcountrymen, perhaps because he recog-nizes elements of himself in the general-ized portrait of the well-dressed, exces-sively outfitted angler.

The American conceives of fishing asmore than a sport: it is his personalcontest against nature. He buys moun-tains of equipment: reels, lines, rods,lures, all vastly expensive. Indeed, themanufacture and sale of fishing equip-ment is one of America’s very largebusinesses. But equipment does not fin-ish it. The fisherman must clothe him-self for the fish with special and againexpensive costumes. Then, if he canafford it, he buys or charters a boat asspecialized for fishing as an operatingtheater is for surgery. He is now ready tochallenge the forces of nature in theirfishy manifestations.52

American fishermen “enter a kind ofpiscatorial religion all for the purpose ofdemonstrating his superiority over fish,”53

a national attitude of acquisitiveness andconquest that Steinbeck finds ruthlessand unsavory and that reaches its zenithin a view of fishing as a testosterone-fueled battle.

He prefers the huge and powerfuldenizens of the sea which have great nui-sance and little food value. Once fas-tened to his enemy, the fisherman sub-jects himself to physical torture whilestrapped into a chrome barber’s chair,and resists for hours having his armstorn off. But he has proved that he is bet-ter than the fish. . . . The fishermanendows the fish with great intelligenceand fabulous strength to the end that indefeating it he is even more intelligentand powerful.54

It is not too much of a stretch to sensethe shadow of Hemingway as writer andiconic sporting celebrity in Steinbeck’sdissection of the big-game fishing craze.In an era before catch and release becamea fairly standard practice among fresh-and saltwater sport fishers, trophy fish-ing held no interest for Steinbeck.

Photographs of Hemingway posing withhis catch of astonishingly big oceanfish—blue marlin, mako shark, sailfish,tarpon, barracuda, or tuna—are legion.Photos add a powerful visual dimensionto such books as Fishing with Heming-way and Glassell and Hemingway onFishing,55 and remind us dramatically ofa way Steinbeck never cared to be. In fact,one looks in vain for photos of Steinbeckand his trophy fish. As far as I know, thereare none, which I believe proves a pointmade by Jackson Benson in a 1985 essayoriginally called “Hemingway the Hunterand Steinbeck the Farmer,” that “whereHemingway was drawn toward the actionto participate, Steinbeck was drawntoward it to observe.”56

Steinbeck’s implicit criticism of theperformative Hemingway is in somesense an ethical one, for he decried thewaste of such great creatures. In fact, adecade later, Steinbeck was especiallycritical of “the shark hunter,” who,though not named in his essay, was veryprobably Montauk charter captain FrankMundus (the alleged model for PeterBenchley’s character Quint in Jaws).Mundus was already making a publi-cized name for himself in eastern LongIsland Sound waters for having success-fully harpooned a 4,500-pound greatwhite in June 1964 and was gaining a rep-utation as one of the only captains regu-larly targeting sharks as rod-and-reelquarry. Steinbeck’s response is telling:“He kills these great and interesting ani-mals not only with glee but with a senseof administering justice to a cruel andhated enemy. The carcasses are usuallythrown away after photographing. Thereis utterly no understanding that sharksmay well be factors in an intricate ecolog-ical balance.”57 Anyone who has watchedDiscovery Channel’s popular Shark Week

John Steinbeck was not a fan of those anglers who, like ErnestHemingway (above), had a propensity for posing with their catch of the day.

From the collection of the American Museum of Fly Fishing

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(or on a less savory note, Outdoor LifeNetwork’s Shark Hunter series) will rec-ognize immediately the prophetic importof Steinbeck’s statement.

So what was Steinbeck’s ideal fishingscenario? Not surprisingly, in an articlethat appeared on commission in a Frenchpublication, Steinbeck reserves his high-est praise for the patient, noncompetitivestyle of fishing he encounters along theSeine in Paris and later “on the banks ofthe lovely Oise on a summer Sundayafternoon.”58 The French angling methodappeals because it is sedentary, simple,playful, and both nonhierarchical andnonteleological, which is to say, in amaterial sense, it is useless (I am inclinedto say “un-American”). Instead, theFrench method (if I may crib from vener-able Izaak Walton) is “like virtue,” an endand “reward” in itself.59 Steinbeck sumsup this avocation:

Here is no sentiment, no contest, nograndeur, no economics. Now and thena silly baby fish may be caught but mostof the time there seems to be a courte-ous understanding by which fish andfisherman let each other strictly alone.Apparently there is also a rule aboutconversation. The fisherman’s eyes get adreaming look and he turns inward onhis own thoughts, inspecting himselfand his world in quiet. Because he isfishing, he is safe from interruption. Hecan rest detached from the stresses andpressures of his life. . . . From the sanc-tity of this occupation, a man mayemerge refreshed and in control of hisown soul. He is not idle. He is fishing.60

Besides anticipating Herbert Hoover’ssentiment (that fishing refreshes thesoul), Steinbeck’s passage also proves a

point about cultural difference that PaulSchullery makes in “Civilized Fishing,”the tenth chapter in Royal Coachman:“The codes of behavior by which wedefine what is acceptable in fishing infact require a great deal of flexibility ofus. Fishing is what we make of it andwhat we decide, in each location, isbest.”61 In this passage, Steinbeck is writ-ing with the ghost of his uncle, ThomasHamilton, in mind, and he has cast hisline back to chapter 23 of East of Eden,where he had extolled a similar kind ofpastoral, ruminative silence and a civi-lized noncompetitive deportment thatallowed his elder not to care whether fishwere caught or not: “He needed not totriumph over animals” (p. 606). I don’tknow whether it is as simple as saying“like uncle, like nephew,” or that “blood(or perhaps ink) is thicker than water,”but in an age when the most profoundhistorical/contextual determinants of flyfishing for trout are increased anglingpressure, whirling disease, prolongeddrought, New Zealand mud snails, habitatdegradation, acid rain, hatchery-rearedfish, and increasingly embattled public-access rights, the river-gazing persona’sserene attitude toward angling thatemerges in “On Fishing” is worth seriousconsideration. In fact, Steinbeck’s post-modern take on fishing, which sanelyemphasizes process over product as thetrue register of success, is a precursor of acurrent activity beginning to take hold onsuch rivers as the West Branch of theDelaware, in which dry flies are dressedon a John Betts–inspired hook (with ringor eye in place of a point) or just a hookthat has had its bend or barb clipped off.The goal of this “bite and relinquish” or

“touch and go” effort is to fool the troutto rise and take a fly without theinevitable stress and traumatic mishan-dling caused by hooking, playing, andlanding fish. If this strategy makes fly fish-ing more of a dilettantish aesthetic exer-cise than ever before, it also has the indis-putable concrete value of extendingrenewability of our already beleagueredwild trout population.

A FISH BY ANY OTHER NAME

Besides John Steinbeck, of how manyother American novelists can it be saidthat a new species of fish was namedafter them? I don’t have any hard factsand provable data about this, but myguess is none. Zero. Zip. In 1939, ichthy-ologist Dr. Rolf Bolin of StanfordUniversity’s Hopkins Marine Stationnamed the longfin lampfish Lampanyctussteinbecki.62 This is an honor, which wereit more widely known, might rival—even eventually surpass—the prestige ofSteinbeck’s Nobel Prize among us fishytypes, and proves a point made years agoby the redoubtable Sparse Grey Hackle(aka Alfred W. Miller) to the effect thatthe best fishing is not always in water butin print. Think of the possibilities: fromhis early days as Lake Tahoe “piscatorialobstetrician” overseeing the propagationof millions of trout for the CaliforniaFish and Game Commission, to partici-pant on a landmark collecting trip to theGulf of California, to self-proclaimedexpert observer of other people’s fishing,to internationally acclaimed author ofsuch classics as The Fish of Wrath, FisheryRow, The Wayward Fish, The Fish of OurDiscontent, The Acts of King Arthur andHis Noble Fish, John Steinbeck was trulyone with the fishes.

Indeed, he is all aroun’ in the darkwater, wherever there’s a fish beinghooked, he’ll be there; wherever there’s acop beatin’ up a fish, he’ll be there. Why,he’ll be in the way kids laugh when it’stime to go fishing, and, since his asheswere committed to the ocean off PointLobos, we can say, in Sicilian fashion,Steinbeck still sleeps with the fishes.Whenever we remember Lennie strokinga dead fish in his pocket or asking Georgeto let him please tend the fishes, whenev-er we dress our flies, bait our hooks, orwet our lines, whenever we sit down tobaked salmon or grilled trout at a trendybistro, whenever we are tempted to behaunted by waters, we should rememberJohn Steinbeck’s parting words: “It hasalways been my private conviction thatany man who pits his intelligence againsta fish and loses has it coming.”63

"

A French angler working the Seine in Paris.

Alex de Carvalho

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1. John Steinbeck IV and NancySteinbeck, The Other Side of Eden: Life withJohn Steinbeck (Amherst, N.Y.: PrometheusBooks, 2001), 22.2. John Steinbeck, “On Fishing.” In

Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson, eds.America and Americans and SelectedNonfiction (New York: Penguin, 2002), 133.Steinbeck’s article (written in English, thentranslated into French by Jean-FrancoisRozan) originally appeared as “Sur les bordsde l’Oise” (“On the banks of the Oise”) in theFrench-language journal Le Figaro Litteraireon 10 July 1954 and was collected, with anumber of Steinbeck’s Figaro pieces, as theeighth chapter in a little-known, limited-edi-tion paperback volume, Un Americain à New-York et à Paris (Paris: Rene Julliard, 1956).Between August 1954 and January 1955, theessay was reprinted in English under differenttitles in Punch (“Fishing in Paris”), SportsIllustrated (“Of Fish and Fishermen”), andAmerican, British, and Canadian editions ofReader’s Digest (“How to Fish in French”). Itappears as “On Fishing” in America andAmericans and Selected Nonfiction (JohnSteinbeck, edited by Susan Shillinglaw and J.Benson, copyright ©2002 by Elaine Steinbeckand Thomas Steinbeck; used by permissionof Viking Penguin, a division of PenguinGroup [USA] Inc.) and is the source I employthroughout this essay. Jackson J. Benson, TheTrue Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer(New York: Viking Press, 1984), 760, quotes aJune 1953 letter by Steinbeck regarding hisnewly completed fishing essay. In the letter,Steinbeck told his Viking Press editor, PascalCovici: “I enclose . . . the newest article forFigaro. An essay on fishing. I think it is trueand hope you find it amusing. The boys [sonsThom and John IV] have poles now and areready to do some fishing in the Seine. Andabout time too. Catbird [family nickname forJohn IV] would rather fish than do anythingin the world. It is the only thing that can holdhis attention indefinitely.”3. Herbert Hoover, Fishing for Fun and

to Wash Your Soul, ed. William Nichols (NewYork: Random House, 1963), 30.4. Steinbeck and Steinbeck, The Other Side

of Eden, 21. In his essay in Susan Shillinglaw’sJohn Steinbeck: Centennial Reflections byAmerican Writers (San Jose, Calif.: Center forSteinbeck Studies, 2002), 89, Thom Steinbeckcorroborated his younger brother’s memory:“ . . . my father had little interest in catchingfish. . . . Instead, he considered a line in thewater as a perfect cover for reading or day-dreaming. I have known him on many occa-sions to ignore baiting his hook altogether,because a strike . . . would distract his train ofthought.”5. John Steinbeck, personal correspon-

dence with parents [John Ernst and OliveHamilton Steinbeck], April 1927, Wells FargoSteinbeck Collection, M1063, Department ofSpecial Collections, Stanford UniversityLibraries, Stanford, California. Quoted withpermission. Years later, Steinbeck still showedenthusiasm for eating the occasional quarry.

“We spent the last long weekend at the [Elia]Kazan’s in Connecticut,” he told his sister.“Chris Kazan, who is fourteen, and I, did a lotof Pickeral [sic] fishing and got a lot ofPickeral—I’m going to try and smoke themin my new barbecue. . . . I love smoked fish.”John Steinbeck, personal correpondence withEsther Steinbeck Rodgers, 7 June 1953, WellsFargo Steinbeck collection, M1063, Depart-ment of Special Collections, StanfordUniversity Libraries, Stanford, California.Quoted with permission.6. Thom Steinbeck, interview with

author, Hempstead, New York, March 2002.7. Jim Harrison, interview with author,

Livingston, Montana, August 2003.8. Mark Kingwell, Catch and Release:

Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life (NewYork: Viking Penguin, 2003), 81.9. Mark Browning, Haunted by Waters: Fly

Fishing in North American Literature (Athens,Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1998), 148.10. Robert DeMott, Steinbeck’s Type-

writer: Essays on His Art (Troy, N.Y.: WhitstonPublishing, 1996), 234–64.11. Ted Leeson, Jerusalem Creek: Journeys

into Driftless Country (Guilford, Conn.: LyonsPress, 2002), 57.12. Benson, True Adventures of John

Steinbeck, 8. Benson states later in this biog-raphy that Steinbeck “spent a lot of time plot-ting against . . . fish,” and that “he consideredhimself an experienced sailor and fisherman”(841).13. Robert DeMott, Steinbeck’s Reading

(New York: Garland Publishing, 1984), 62–63;156–57.14. W. D. Wetherell, “Why Fish?” In

Upland Stream: Notes on the Fishing Passion(Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 184–204.15. John Steinbeck, “Then My Arm

Glassed Up.” In Shillinglaw and Benson, eds.America and Americans and SelectedNonfiction, 127–28.16. Nick Lyons, Full Creel: A Nick Lyons

Reader (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,2000), xvi.17. Odell Shepard, Thy Rod and Thy Creel

(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1931), 77.18. Craig Nova, Brook Trout and the

Writing Life (New York: Lyons Press, 1999), 51.19. Kingwell, Catch and Release, 3–4.20. Thomas Fensch, ed. John Steinbeck,

Conversations with John Steinbeck (Jackson,Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 22.21. Quoted in Nick Lyons, ed. Robert

Traver [John D. Voelker], Traver on Fishing(Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2001), 119.22. John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel:

The East of Eden Letters (New York: VikingPress, 1969), 105. Each working day fromJanuary through October 1951, before settlingdown to write two thousand words on hisnovel, Steinbeck penned a diary entry,addressed to his Viking Press editor, PascalCovici, in which he discussed a wide range oftopics, such as his plan of work, his aestheticintentions for the novel, his memories of theHamilton (his mother’s) family, and more.Steinbeck’s lengthy original handwritten

manuscript of East of Eden (comprising morethan five hundred 10-by-14-inch lined ledgerpages), housed at the Harry RansomHumanities Research Center at the Universityof Texas, Austin, reveals that he wrote thenovel expressly for his sons, Thom and JohnIV, then aged seven and five, to tell themabout the universal human stories of goodand evil, fulfillment and loss. The publishedversion of East of Eden (New York: VikingPress, 1952) was significantly cut, and as aresult, many of the digressive and oftendidactic, editorial addresses to his sons weredeleted. See my Steinbeck’s Typewriter, 206–32.The Steinbeck sons remembered their father’spredelictions well. During Steinbeck’s work-ing summer on Nantucket, fishing was some-times an excuse for daydreaming about hisnovel project. On 13 July 1951, Steinbeck toldCovici,“I took Thursday off and went fishing.. . .The fishing trip got no fish and I got apainful sunburn but out of it I got a wholenew extension of the book. I guess I neverreally do stop working.” See Elaine Steinbeckand Robert Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life inLetters (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 424.23. John Steinbeck, on East of Eden. Quoted

in Robert DeMott, ed. Novels, 1942–1952 (NewYork: Library of America, 2001), 602.24. Leeson, Jerusalem Creek, 239.25. Steve Raymond, Rivers of the Heart: A

Fly-Fishing Memoir (New York: Lyons Press,1998), 167.26. Steinbeck, East of Eden, 606.27. Ibid.28. Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler

Or, The Contemplative Man’s Recreation, withInstructions How to Angle for a Trout orGrayling in a Clear Stream, by Charles Cotton.Introduction by Howell Raines (New York:Modern Library, 1996), 37.29. Steinbeck, East of Eden, 607.30. Nova, Brook Trout and the Writing

Life, 111.31. Graham Watson, Book Society (New

York: Atheneum, 1980), 108. Later, Steinbeckreported gleefully to Watson: “I am wearingthe hat with great success. Men, prone to takeit lightly as a piece of solid British frippery,are thrown into a paroxysm of admiration atthe beautiful salmon flies.” See Steinbeck andWallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, 498.32. Edward Weeks, Fresh Waters (Boston:

Little, Brown, 1968), 87.33. This highly truncated chronology

ignores the equally important but shorter-lived development of U.S. fly fishing, thestory of which is available in Paul Schullery’sindispensable American Fly Fishing: A History(New York: Nick Lyons Books, 1987) and inhis essay collection Royal Coachman: The Loreand Legends of Fly-Fishing (New York: Simon& Schuster, 1999).34. Arnold Gingrich, The Fishing in Print:

A Guided Tour through Five Centuries ofAngling Literature (New York: WinchesterPress, 1974), 199. I fished the River Test a fewyears ago and was bemused and fascinated tofind that some of the same protocols and reg-ulations are still in effect: you are expected to

ENDNOTES

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FALL 2006 1 1

cast only to visible fish, and you are not sup-posed to leave the bank and wade. Break theserules, and you risk being chided as a loutishYank, as Texas novelist William Humphrey, inhis entertaining chapter about British chalkstream fishing, “Bill Breaks His Duck,” whichappears in Open Season: Sporting Adventures(New York: Dell, 1989), characterized thisway: “ . . . down on the river there awaited usa fishing catechism as strict as any church’s. Itwas to be a series of Thou Shalt Nots” (176).35. W. D. Wetherell, Vermont River (New

York: Lyons Press, 1984), 99.36. Howell Raines, Fly Fishing through the

Midlife Crisis (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 98.37. Thomas McGuane, The Longest

Silence: A Life in Fishing (New York: Knopf,1999), ix.38. See “Fly Fishing’s Mystery Woman,”

Fly Rod & Reel (July/October 2005, vol. 27),14; and “Hardy Girl Update,” Fly Rod & Reel(November/December 2005, vol. 27), 10.39. Jack Hemingway, Misadventures of a

Fly Fisherman: My Life with and without Papa(Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1986), 18.40. Skues, one of modern fly fishing’s

undisputed heroes, records his historical rec-ollection of Tups Indispensable in chapter 7of his 1939 book, Nymph Fishing for ChalkStream Trout. Skues, who published a slimbut nonetheless revolutionary text calledMinor Tactics of the Chalk Stream in 1910, pio-neered fishing subsurface flies and made sig-nificant inroads into the Halfordian dry-fly-only congregation. In Open Season, WilliamHumphrey claims without hesitation thatSkues may have been the “best trout fisher-man who ever lived” (177). Certainly, Skueswas a tireless innovator, and in both booksmentioned here he writes convincingly offishing the Tups Indispensable as a wet fly.See the Skues handy double collection,Nymph Fishing for Chalk Stream Trout &Minor Tactics of the Trout Stream (London:Adam and Charles Black, 1974). I have neverbeen able to determine if Steinbeck everheard of Skues, much less read his work, butI always found it intriguing and perhaps evena bit suspicious that the names of two chiefcharacters in East of Eden—brothers Adamand Charles Trask—mirror the names ofSkues’s London publisher.41. Gordon Wickstrom, Notes from an

Old Fly Book (Boulder, Colo.: University Pressof Colorado, 2001), 17.42. Jan Zita Grover, Northern Waters (St.

Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1999), 201.43. Shirley Fisher, “Steinbeck’s Days in

Sag Harbor.” New York Times (3 December1978), Long Island Section, 20.44. Watson, Book Society, 109. Watson fur-

ther claims that Steinbeck “loved the sound ofa line stripping off a reel, the feel of a newlyhoned knife, the smell of beeswaxed leather,the texture of a well-oiled rifle stock . . .” (109).45. Andrew Herd, The Fly (Ellesmere,

England: Medlar Press, 2003), 262.46. Susan Stewart’s brilliant treatise on

nostalgia, On Longing: Narratives of theMiniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, theCollection (1984; rptd. Durham, N.C.: DukeUniversity Press, 1993), 68, has suggestive im-

plications for the fly-fishing community,which prizes the small, scaled-down objectsof our sport, such as flies: “the miniatureobject represents an antithetical mode of pro-duction: production by the hand, a produc-tion that is unique and authentic . . . [and is]. . . located at a place of origin (the childhoodof the self . . . ).”47. H. Lea Lawrence, Prowling Papa’s

Waters: A Hemingway Odyssey. Foreword byTed Williams (Atlanta, Ga.: Longstreet Press,1992), 189. One of Hemingway’s personal fav-orites—a split-bamboo Hardy “Fairy” flyrod—is on permanent display at the AmericanMuseum of Fly Fishing in Manchester,Vermont.48. Steinbeck, “Then My Arm Glassed

Up,” 128.49. Steinbeck, “On Fishing,” 132. See

Warren French, John Steinbeck’s NonfictionRevisited (New York: Twayne Publishers,1996), 83–99, for an account of the personal,professional, and political contexts ofSteinbeck’s Figaro publications, all of whichthe novelist hoped would lighten strainedFranco-American relations, and many ofwhich French rightly claims “deserve to bebetter known” (99).50. Steinbeck, “On Fishing,” 133.51. Ibid., 133–34.52. Ibid., 132. Steinbeck was not immune

from boasting about the attractions of a well-equipped fishing boat. In Steinbeck: A Life inLetters (Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten,eds.), he told Webster Street on 5 July 1955:“This afternoon, we are taking our boat offMontauk Point to fish for blues. They are finefighting fish and wonderful to eat and they aresaid to be running well right now. It is about aforty-five minute run in our boat which willdo thirty-four miles an hour if it has to. It is asea skiff, lapstrake, twenty feet long and eightfeet of beam and a hundred horse power Greymarine engine. I could cross the Atlantic inher if I could carry the gasoline. . . . This is fab-ulous boating country and fishing countrytoo” (505). For more on Steinbeck’s LongIsland Sound boating/fishing experiences, seeBenson, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck,772, 777–78, 790, 841.53. Steinbeck, “On Fishing,” 132.54. Ibid., 132–33.55. See S. Kip Farrington, Fishing with

Hemingway and Glassell (New York: DavidMcKay, 1971), and Ernest Hemingway,Hemingway on Fishing (Nick Lyons, ed.; fore-word by Jack Hemingway; New York: LyonsPress, 2000). In his last book, Travels withCharley: In Search of America (New York:Viking Press, 1962), 87, Steinbeck records anunsuccessful fishing outing, which includes apointed allusion to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and/or Hemingway’s The OldMan and the Sea (1952): “We walked and castand did everything we knew to interest bassor pike. My friend kept saying, ‘They’re rightdown there if we can just get the messagethrough.’ But we never did. If they were downthere, they still are. A remarkable amount offishing is like that, but I like it just the same.My wants are simple. I have no desire to latchonto a monster symbol of fate and prove mymanhood in titanic piscine war, but some-

times I do like a couple of cooperative fish offrying size.”56. Jackson J. Benson, Looking for Stein-

beck’s Ghost (Norman, Okla.: University ofOklahoma Press, 1988), 220.57. Steinbeck, “Then My Arm Glassed

Up,” 128.58. Steinbeck, “On Fishing,” 134. The Oise

enters the Seine northwest of Paris. In an ear-lier Figaro piece, “J’aime cette Ile de la Cite”(“I Love This Isle of the City”), which appearsas “One American in Paris (fourth piece)” inShillinglaw and Benson, eds., America andAmericans and Selected Nonfiction, Steinbeckwrote evocatively of watching the Seine Riverfishermen with his sons, Thom and John IV,who “wait patiently for some of the many fish-ermen to catch a fish and when some tiny thingis hooked we run to examine and to congratu-late. This minnow is a trump beyond which thebig game fisherman cannot rise” (247).59. Walton, The Compleat Angler, 25.60. Steinbeck, “On Fishing,” 134–35.61. Schullery, Royal Coachman, 165.62. Eric Enno Tamm, Beyond the Outer

Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, thePioneering Ecologist Who Inspired JohnSteinbeck and Joseph Campbell (New York:Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 2004), 277.Dr. Rolf Ling Bolin (1901–1973), ichthyologistand oceanographer, was assistant director ofStanford University’s Hopkins Marine Sta-tion at Pacific Grove, California. In Sea ofCortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel andResearch (New York: Viking Press, 1941), 31,Steinbeck and his collaborator Edward F.Ricketts praise Bolin because he “loves truethings.” In Working Days: The Journals of TheGrapes of Wrath, 1938–1941, ed. Robert DeMott(New York: Viking Press, 1989), 29, Steinbecknoted on 17 June 1938, “Doc Bolin here yester-day. Fine people. He is going on a collecting tripto the south seas and is very excited about it.”Deep in the writing of The Grapes of Wrath,Steinbeck noted ruefully, “I’d like to go butwon’t or can’t or something” (29).63. Steinbeck,“On Fishing,” 133. Steinbeck’s

presence among contemporary fly fishers hasodd ways of making itself felt. James R. Babb,in Crosscurrents: A Fly Fisher’s Progress (NewYork: Lyons Press, 1999), 155, quotes fromSteinbeck and Ricketts’s Sea of Cortez as anepigram for his chapter, “Cabo Wabo.” In hislast interview, Gary La Fontaine told Craig J.Oberg that he considered Steinbeck’sCannery Row and Sweet Thursday “. . . perfectbooks. That’s what I tried to pattern FlyFishing the Mountain Lakes after. They hadjust the right number of words to get acrossthe effect of the story, and they had the per-fect amount of information”; see “One Nine-Inch Rainbow—A Last Conversation withGary LaFontaine,” Weber Studies (Fall 2002,vol. 20), 11. Rick Wollum, host of thirteenepisodes of ESPN’s Fly Fishing America in1999, revealed that the format of his peri-patetic series was indebted to Steinbeck’sTravels with Charley (interview with author,Livingston, Montana, August 2005).

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12 THE AMERICAN FLY FISHER

CURIOUS ABOUT MY namesake’s limb of the family tree, Irummaged around up in the attic and discovered a ver-itable treasure buried there in a steamer trunk.

Kneeling, I blew the dust off my grandfather’s scrapbook, thengingerly turned its browned and brittle pages until I found afascinating magazine article. It described a bicycling and fly-fishing adventure that took place back in July 1896.1

From San Angelo, Texas, the story related, Rhodes Baker,2

age twenty-two, and his friend George Allen,3 forty-one (pro-prietor of Allen’s Music Store in San Angelo), pedaled south-west to Sonora, then farther south to Juno and the Devils Rivercountry, into Del Rio, across the Rio Grande via ferry raftpoled by elbow grease to Villa Acuña, Mexico, thence east toBrackett and Fort Clark, then back home through RockSprings to point of beginning.

Whew! Consult the map: that twelve-day trip of ap-proximately 425 miles would be difficult today, but even moreso over the primitive stagecoach roads and wagon trails of 1896in the heat of a sweltering Texas July.

Allen and Baker were “San Angelo Wheelmen,” a band offun-loving and adventuresome young folks much like manyother cycling groups organized across the United States duringthe Gay Nineties, bicycling’s Golden Age.

Women, too, took to pedaling. Indeed, that activity provedso liberating for the fairer sex that it met with denunciationfrom some church pulpits for its radical departure from Vic-torian principles of feminine fashion and proper behavior.

In tolerant San Angelo, however, wheeling by the distaff sidewas accepted without raised eyebrows and finger-wagging con-demnation. Moreover, women’s fashions soon accommodatedthe biking craze with shorter skirts and bloomers that modest-

EchoesEchoes from Yesteryear

by Rhodes S. Baker III

An old map of West Texas, the eastern portion of which encom-passed the areas of the bicycle trip. Map courtesy of the WestTexas Collection, Angelo State University, San Angelo, Texas.

The author’s grandfather Rhodes S. Baker (left), nineteen,and his friend F. George Allen (right), thirty-eight, posed foran 1893 studio shot in San Angelo, Texas. These intrepidsportsmen traveled light while off on their cycling adventures,but still found room for their fly rods. Photo from the Bakerfamily collection.

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ly covered the legs to the ankles.And the drop-frame design pio-neered by Charles Duryea in 1895allowed women to dismount abicycle without having to—inan unladylike fashion—swing aleg over.

Allen used his wheels bothfor business and pleasure, trav-eling great distances to sell andtune pianos and other musicalinstruments. His friend Bakeroften tagged along, a Colt pistoland fly rod packed in his roll(along with other bare essen-tials), and they raced togetheracross the West Texas country-side for sporting fun and busi-ness profit.

Allen’s first long cycling tripwas in the early 1880s to theranch of Will Sanderson, lo-cated in the Live Oak Draw ofthe Pecos River, about 150 milessouthwest of San Angelo. Hewent way out west pedaling hisColumbia to tune a piano he’dsold to Sanderson as a presentfor his daughter. It was thelongest trip ever made by bicycleup to that time, so folks say.

Sometimes the trail grewfaint, and Allen got lost. He’dpause to take a compass reading,adjust his course, then strike outagain across the prairie. Cactusthorns were his nemesis. Hefaced worrisome tire punctures,no gas stations, no air compres-sors—a simple patch kit and afoot pump for emergencyrepairs on the run out in the middle of nowhere. There was theinfernal dust, sandy grit, and other discomforts no end, not tomention a plethora of rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and hornedtoads. He was forever sweating under a sweltering hot sun with

scant shade and little relief fromtepid canteen water.

In June 1896, Baker graduatedfrom the University of Texas, andhis eyes remained fixed upon anattractive coed there, Miss Edna“Pansy” Rembert from Vernon,Texas.4 Baker kept in close touchwith Miss Pansy by frequent cor-respondence that summer of1896, even posting letters to herduring the twelve-day adventuretrek recounted briefly to youhere.

It is known for a fact that theproper Miss Pansy wanted noth-ing to do with adventures of thissort, she not being the “wheeling-type.” Baker, though circumspectin describing his excursion withAllen, spoke of the good fishingon the Devils River and the crit-ters that skittered and slitheredthrough camp, such as skunks,snakes, and tarantulas. Blackbear, mountain lions, white-tailed deer, and fearsome razor-backs also ran free in that scenicbut rugged and prickly canyoncountry.

Baker chronicled his DevilsRiver adventures in letterspenned while in camp and hand-ed off to passing stagecoaches. Ina letter to Pansy (written on asubsequent trip), he notes:

We have been having a mostenjoyable season of fishing; havecaught all the fish we wantedand more than we could eat;thus, we have now inaugurated

the rule that fish must be put back in the river as soon as caught.5

Apparently, my grandfather invented catch and release morethan a hundred years ago!

Our days are passed in fishing, exploring, taking pil-grimages to nearby places sleeping and lounging aroundcamp lying on our cots and reading some old magazinesand yellow-back novels we brought with us on our tour.

I have not yet seen any rattlesnakes on this trip, buthave seen a few water moccasins. No polecats have en-livened camp with their presence. Nothing from the wildhas visited us except tarantulas. They occasionally call,but always seem on business intent and are always takenin the act of marching through camp just as if they didnot know there was such a place as camp. . . . I went upto a Mexican house a short distance from camp a fewdays ago and discovered a dog that had been tied to a treemaking a (great) deal of commotion barking at some-thing on the ground, which something on investigation

Rhodes Baker was infatuated with the lovely University ofTexas coed Miss Edna “Pansy” Rembert of Vernon, Texas,

and penned letters to her while off gallivanting on histurn-of-the-century cycling adventures. Baker soon settled

down, however, and commenced a distinguished legalcareer in Dallas, Texas, where Miss Pansy and he were

betrothed in 1899. Photo from the Baker family collection.

This overhang among the cliffs along the Devils Riverin Val Verde County, north of Del Rio, Texas, shelters

priceless, ancient Indian petroglyphs on its walls.Baker and Allen likely camped and fished here while

on their cycling odyssey of July 1896. Photo © courtesyof Michelle Huebner d/b/a Thunder Outfitters, LLC.

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14 THE AMERICAN FLY FISHER

proved to be a tarantula near the foot of the tree, standing per-fectly still eying the dog as if to say that he would hold his groundif necessary till the cows come home and that he did not intendbeing bluffed by any common cur dog.6

Newspaper accounts of the day chronicled cycling competi-tion and its derring-do regularly. In a summary oflocal racing results, the San Angelo Standard of 8October 1892 reported:

In the half-mile bicycle race there were only three en-tries, Rhodes Baker, Harry Hickley and Bob Holland.The track having two inches of dust on it was heavyenough to kill any ordinary man. Hickley’s machinebroke down a short distance from the starting pole; Bob

Holland’s followed suit coming down the quarter stretch andRhodes Baker won in a canter.

The Standard of 24 February 1894 spoke of one of Allen’s andBaker’s noteworthy wheeling exploits:

A Bicycle Trip to the Devils River

F. G. Allen and Rhodes Baker returned the first of the week froma combined business and pleasure trip to Sonora and the DevilsRiver country, going as far south as the R. W. Prosser ranch.They stopped two days with Mr. Hiram Young, enjoying his hos-pitality and a hunt with him in the Devils River canyon. Theiroutward run from San Angelo to Sonora, 72 miles, was made in8 hours and 45minutes.

Baker had migrated to San Angelo with his family in 1884from Duck Hill, Mississippi. His father, Colonel Andrew JacksonBaker, was a Confederate veteran (the storied University Graysof the 11th Mississippi) who exhibited utmost bravery and sur-vived wounds sustained in the bloody cornfield at Sharpsburg(known as Antietam in Yankee parts) in 1862 and less than a yearlater at Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. At the time of RhodesBaker’s and George Allen’s trek across West Texas, Colonel Bakerwas serving as Texas’s land commissioner under Governor CharlesCulberson.

George Allen, a Yankee from Boston, arrived in Tom GreenCounty, Texas, in 1881 with intentions of becoming a sheepman;instead, he entered the music business, selling pianos and othermusical instruments. The likeness of a comely goddess ofmusic strumming a stringed instrument adorned his businessletterhead. Cowboys on long cattle drives entertained them-selves around the campfire playing tunes, such as “Get AlongLittle Dogie” and “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” onFrench harps procured from Allen’s music store.

In June 1896, Baker (a graduating student at the University ofTexas) and Allen exchanged correspondence about their upcomingtrip to the Devils River. Allen used his bicycle for business and plea-

sure, often pedaling long distances in record time to peddle andtune instruments. Allen’s colorful letterhead advertised his musical

wares under supervision of a strumming Greek goddess. Letterfrom the Baker family collection.

This interesting photograph of the “wheeling crowd”was taken circa 1897–1898 at the Oakes Street bridge,

which spanned the Concho River in San Angelo, Texas.Wheelman A. S. Lowe identified several of the cyclists.He noted the fellow on the left with wheel upended as“a floater named Hayes, who beat my mother out of a

small board bill.” “The boy lying down with faceagainst the water is one of the Ligon boys and I think

his name is Alvro.” “Thumbing his nose is Shan Hull”(ironically, Hull later became a Methodist minister).

And (in the middle) “George Allen, the music storeman.” Photo courtesy of the West Texas Collection,

Angelo State University, San Angelo, Texas.

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I shake my head in wonder just thinking of my granddadand his friend George Allen, what they saw and what they didas they wheeled up and down those miles and miles of dustytrails back in the good old days.

Traveling the trail along the headwaters of the Devils Riverat the Prosser Ranch, Allen and Baker most likely spent thenight at Baker’s Crossing before crossing the river and headingsouth to Comstock and Del Rio.

The proprietors of Baker’s Crossing, Dave and Lizzie Baker(no kin to the Bakers of San Angelo) were well-known in thoseparts for never turning away a stranger, whether outlaws, in-laws, or ne’er-do-wells. They’d owned the 107 acres since 1884,having bought it from a man who sold out soon after he stum-bled upon a gruesome scene of Native American violencedown the road a piece at Dead Man’s Crossing.7

Dave Baker, age forty-six, was a crack shot who spent mostof his time hunting bears and panthers in the surroundingDevils River canyons with a pack of hounds. When he was notchasing wild game, Dave must have been chasing Lizzie, forthey had as many children as you could count on both hands.

There were other colorful characters that Allen and Bakermight have encountered in those parts, including the leg-endary J. H. McMahan (referred to in later life as “The OldMan of the River”). James Henry McMahan (1845–1932) was aConfederate veteran, fearless Indian fighter, trapper, and anexplorer who stood out rather prominently—he was an albino.If Baker and Allen didn’t cross paths with McMahan, theyprobably enjoyed some soup from turtles he’d caught out ofthe Rio Grande and sold to Del Rio hotels and eating estab-lishments. Half-blind at age eighty-six, McMahan died on a DelRio street when he walked into traffic, was struck by a passingmotorist, and fell, fracturing his skull.8

HOME AT LAST

Upon his return to San Angelo, Baker penned another letterto his lady friend in Vernon, Texas, summing up the incredible

bicycle trip in a single paragraph. Theterse summary read like a real estatelegal description.

San Angelo, July 15, ’96Miss Pansy RembertVernon, Texas

Dear Miss Pansy,

I have just returned from a 12-day bicycleand fishing trip and feel like I have beengone a month. We went south down theDevils River to Del Rio, thence across theRio Grande for a short stay into Mexico,thence to Brackett where is located FortClark, thence back home, in all about 425miles. The trip was full of enjoyment forme; but for you who doubts if you couldfind anything very interesting in rocks andtrees and rivers and birds and mountains,I could not describe it very entertainingly.

Very Sincerely,Rhodes Baker

I never knew my grandfather; he diedtwo weeks before my birth. However, myresearch and travels provided a fascinat-ing, vicarious glimpse into the life ofRhodes Baker, source of my name andinfatuation with fly fishing.

"

ENDNOTES

1. “Horses Shied, Tires Collapsed But Cyclists Rode On,” WesternWeekly Magazine (unknown date, author).2. Rhodes Semmes Baker (1874–1940); prominent Dallas attorney

and church and civic leader.3. F. George Allen (1855–1939). Music, church, and cycling were

George Allen’s only loves until he renounced his bachelorhood andmarried Beatrice Fitch in 1899.4. Edna Miller Rembert (1878–1955) married Rhodes S. Baker on

26 January 1899.5. Rhodes Baker, letter to Mrs. Rhodes Baker, 2 August 1903

(camp), postmarked 3 August in Comstock, Texas (north of Del Rio,west of the Devils River). Rhodes affectionately greets Pansy as “MyDear Little Girl.” Pansy was a fishing widow at an early age; the letterwas addressed to her care of her mother in Vernon, Texas. She had beenforewarned, however; Mr. Baker’s love affair with the Devils River wasno secret.6. Ibid.7. Dave and Lizzie Baker acquired the Baker’s Crossing place of 107

acres in the spring of 1884, paying $1,000; $250 down and three annualinstallments of $250 each. Considered top dollar for land in those days,Dave paid a premium price because of its pretty spot on the river andthe fact that it already had a house on it.8. Mr. McMahan’s death certificate and the Del Rio Evening

News, 23 January 1932.

Dave and Lizzie Baker settled at Baker’s Crossing on the Devils River in 1884. Baker’sCrossing was a stop on Deaton’s Stage Line that ran from Comstock to Ozona. Lizzie,

wife and mother, also served as postmistress. Dave provided food for the table by hunt-ing game with his hounds in the rugged Devils River canyons. (Note the bear carcass in

the photo.) Photo courtesy of Whitehead Memorial Museum, Del Rio, Texas.

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16 THE AMERICAN FLY FISHER

IT IS A GREAT PITY that Thomas Bewick, renowned Englishwood engraver and naturalist, never completed his book AHistory of British Fishes. Like his General History of

Quadrupeds (1790) and History of British Birds (1797 and 1804),it would undoubtedly have become a classic of its genre andmuch sought after by naturalists and bibliophiles alike. TheHistory of British Fishes was to have followed the same formatas his other two books. Each fish would have had its own chap-ter, headed by an engraving of the species itself, and closedwith a tailpiece, a vignette depicting some aspect of life, notnecessarily relating to the particular fish. This format hadproved immensely popular, and both his Quadrupeds and Birdswent through several editions during Bewick’s lifetime.Fortunately, however, Bewick did produce several fish engrav-ings in preparation for his History of British Fishes and morethan twenty vignettes depicting angling scenes, many of whichare to be found in A Memoir of Thomas Bewick written byHimself, published posthumously in 1862. The angling scenesin particular are miniature masterpieces, seldom more than 2inches across, depicting incidents, often humorous, to whichanglers of all generations can relate. Indeed, they are so care-

fully observed as to leave the viewer with no doubt that Bewickhimself was an angler.

Thomas Bewick was born on 10 August 1753 at CherryburnHouse (now a museum devoted to Bewick), Eltringham, North-umberland, within a stone’s throw of the River Tyne. His father,

Thomas Bewick: Artist and Anglerby J. Keith Harwood

An earlier version of this article appeared in the February 2003 issue ofWaterlog.

Newcastle artist William Nicholson painted this portraitof his friend Thomas Bewick. When he moved to

Edinburgh in 1814, Bewick displayed the portrait to helpadvertise his skills. Tyne & Wear Museums’ collection.

Cherryburn House, where Bewick was born,and the farmyard where he observed birds.

J. Keith Harwood

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John, was the tenant of a small 8-acre farm and an adjacent col-liery. His grandfather, Thomas, was also a farmer and a keenangler. The young Thomas’s schooldays were definitely not thehappiest of his life, and in his autobiography, A Memoir, hecomplained that he was frequently beaten, even when blame-less. On one occasion, in order to escape yet another beating,he ran away from school. From that timeonward, he was a frequent truant, prefer-ring to spend his time building damsand making little boats to sail onthe local stream. Eventually, hewas sent to the school of theReverend Christopher Gregsonof Ovingham, for whom hismother, Jane, had served ashousekeeper before her mar-riage. It was here that he dis-covered a talent for drawing,and instead of learning his Latinverbs, he preferred to doodle.

And the margins of my books andevery space of spare and blank paperbecame filled with various kinds ofdevices or scenes I had met with andthese were often accompanied withwretched rhymes explanatory of them; but assoon as I filled all the blank spaces in my book, I had recourse atall spare times to the grave stones and the floor of the churchporch, with a bit of chalk to give vent to this propensity of mindof figuring whatever I had seen.1

His father did not approve of him spending his time in suchidle pursuits, but he could not deter the young artist.

Many of my evenings at home were spent in filling the flags ofthe floor and the hearth stone with my chalky designs. After Ihad long scorched my face in this way, a friend, in compassion,furnished me with a lot of paper upon which to execute mydesigns. Here I had more scope—pen and ink and the juice ofthe brambleberry made a grand change. These were succeededby a camel hair pencil and shells of colours, and thus supplied Ibecame completely set up. But of patterns or drawings I hadnone—the beasts and birds which enlivened the beautifulscenery of woods and wilds surrounding my native hamlet, fur-nished me with an endless supply of subjects.2

Bewick’s love of the countryside and its creatures was furtherenhanced by angling and by following, at every opportunity, thelocal hunt. During the winter months, he was sometimesemployed to look after a small flock of sheep on the fells.

Milking the cows was another duty he was frequently calledupon to perform. While engaged in this task, he developed alove of bird watching.

Within the byer door I snugly watched the appearance of variousbirds which passed the little dean below, and which the severity ofthe weather drove from place to place in search of shelter. Withthe sight of my intimate acquaintances, the robins, the wrens,blackbirds, sparrows, and a solitary crow and some others, I wasnot much attracted, but always felt an extreme pleasure andcuriosity in seeing the more rare visitants, such as the woodcock,the snipe and other waders, with the redwings and fieldfares etc.make their appearance.3

His favorite season of the year was undoubtedly the spring.The lengthening days and warmer weather turned his thoughtsto angling, and he was frequently to be found on the banks ofthe Tyne, a notable game-fishing river both then and now.However, his angling expeditions were the cause of some anx-iety to his parents.

As soon as the bushes and trees began to put forth their budsand made the face of nature look gay—this was the signal for theangler to prepare his fishing tackle, and in doing this I was notbehind hand with any of them in making my own all ready.Fishing rods, set gads and night lines were all soon made fit for

use, and with them late and early I had a busy timeof it during the long summer months and

until the frosts of autumn, forbid me toproceed. The uneasiness which my

late evening wadings by the waterside gave to my father and moth-

er I have often since reflectedupon with regret—they couldnot go to bed with the hopesof getting to sleep, whilehaunted with the apprehensionof my being drowned, and welldo I remember to this day, my

father’s well known whistlewhich called me home—he went

to a little distance from the house,where nothing obstructed the sound,

and whistled so loud through his fingerand thumb that in the still hours of theevening, it may be heard echoing upon

the vale of the Tyne to a very great distance.This whistle I learned to imitate and answered

it as well as I could and then posted home.4

Such was Thomas Bewick’s childhood. However, the timesoon came for him to embark on a career and, in October 1767,

Ovingham Church; Bewick attended the school here.

The River Tyne near Ovingham where Bewick fished.

From Thomas Bewick, The Historyof British Birds: Water Birds (Newcastle,

England: Edward Walker, 1804), 52.

J. Keith Harwood

J. Keith Harwood

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18 THE AMERICAN FLY FISHER

through the influence of Mrs. Simons, his godmother, he wasapprenticed to Ralph Beilby, a Newcastle engraver. Beilby wasnot specifically a wood engraver, but carried out a wide varietyof engraving commissions ranging from brass clock faces anddoorplates to bank notes and shop bills. His speciality wasornamental silver engraving, and he was widely regarded asone of the best in the country. Thus the young Bewick gainedexperience in all aspects of engraving, and it was in woodengraving that he was to make his mark. Beilby himself had nogreat love for wood engraving, so commissions from publishersfor woodcuts were normally given to his apprentice. Bewicksoon found that he had a talent for such work, and it gave himthe opportunity to exercise his drawing skills. One such com-mission, a woodcut of the George and Dragon for a bar bill,attracted a lot of attention and brought in a great deal of sub-sequent work.

During his apprenticeship he was still able to find time forfishing. “When I was an apprentice I had a few holy days atEaster and Whitsuntide allowed me, according to promise, andthese were wholly employed in angling.”5 After completing hisapprenticeship in October 1774, he returned to Cherryburn,where he remained until the summer of 1776. During this time,he undertook a number of engraving commissions, both fromhis former master and from his friend Thomas Angus, aNewcastle printer. He also found much more time for hisfavorite pastime of angling, so much so that by June 1776, hewas becoming tired of it.

Having all my life, at home, at school and during my appren-ticeship lived under perpetual restraints—when I thus feltmyself at liberty, I became as I suppose like a bird which hadescaped from its cage. Even angling of which I was so fond, andof which I thought I never could tire, became rather dull whenI found I might take as much of it as I pleased. While I was pur-suing this sport, on a hot day in June, I gave it up and layingdown my rod awhile, I then tied it up and walked home—hav-ing resolved to see more of the country.6

When he returned home, he packed his bags and embarkedon a walking tour around Scotland. His Scottish travels lasted

until August, but on returning home, he again became restless;in October, he set out for London to seek work. Although hewas successful in London and found plenty of work, he washomesick for his native countryside. By June 1777, he hadreturned once more and set up in partnership with his formermaster, Ralph Beilby. He also took on his younger brother Johnas his apprentice. The partnership prospered, and there was noshortage of commissions. During the spring and summermonths, however, he reserved his Mondays for angling and evencontemplated writing a book about his piscatorial exploits.

I mostly stopped when the weather suited in spring and summer,and spent the Mondays in various streams, at this my favouriteand indeed only diversion. In this I was accompanied with mycheerful associate Jack Roe, with his flies and his tackle, and whenwe had got a number sufficient, I returned that night or the nextmorning with my creel filled with fish, which I divided amongfriends in Newcastle. With an account of these hungry streamwading ramblings and the days spent in angling, and with adescription of the beautiful scenery of water sides and the reno-vating charms which these inspired, a volume might be filled, inimitation of the Patriarch of Anglers, Izaak Walton.7

On the 15 November 1785, the day on which his father died,Bewick began work on A General History of Quadrupeds, thefirst of his natural history books that was to establish his repu-tation and to set a new standard in book illustration. The fol-lowing year, he married Isabella Elliot of Ovingham at St.John’s Church, Newcastle. The History of Quadrupeds eventu-ally appeared in 1790 and was an immediate success, so muchso that his friend George Byles was moved to verse.

On his excellent Engravings on Wood, in the HISTORYof QUADRUPEDS, published at Newcastle.

GO on great Artist in thy pleasing way,And learn us Nature as the rising day:Thy just Creator’s wond’rous beings show,And teach us from thy art—his boundless pow’r to know:Thy charming pencil claims our warm applause,And leads us on to study Nature’s laws.8

Engravings of a tiger, stag,and deer from Thomas

Bewick’s A General Historyof Quadrupeds (Newcastle,

England: Sol. Hodgson, 1790).

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FALL 2006 19

The first volume of his History of British Birds: Land Birds,appeared in 1797, followed by volume two, Water Birds, sevenyears later. What made Bewick’s books so special was not thetext, which was rather pedantic, but the marvelously detailedillustrations of animals and birds in their natural habitats.Indeed, his work was of such quality that it was not until pho-tographic methods of reproduction were used that it was bet-tered. Bewick wanted his books to be of interest to young peo-ple and to lead them to an appreciation of nature.

I illustrated them by figures delineated with all the fidelity andanimation I was able to impart to mere woodcuts withoutcolour; and as instruction is of little avail without constantcheerfulness and occasional amusement, I interspersed the moreserious studies with Tailpieces of gaiety and humour.9

It is these small tailpieces or vignettes that are of interest tothe angler because they frequently depict incidents that allanglers have experienced or to which they can relate. One ofmy favorites is from the tailpiece of the heron, in Water Birds,which depicts a bedraggled angler stoically waiting out a rain-

storm under the shelter of a swaying tree. The ferocity of thedownpour is emphasized by the oblique angle of the sheetingraindrops; in the distance, a castle looms through the foulweather. I can certainly remember several similar experiencesin my angling career.

Another of my favorites, from Land Birds, depicts an agedangler struggling to control his yapping dog, which has pan-icked five cows and attracted the unwanted attention of a verylarge bull. With his walking stick, white hair, and craggy featuresemphasizing his years, the old man is ill-equipped to beat ahasty retreat. I, too, can remember arousing the ire of a bull onmy way home from the river and having to make a quick exitover a barbed wire fence while clad in a pair of chest waders. Itwas not a pleasant experience!

Another common occurrence while angling is getting snaggedup on a branch. In a vignette from The Fables of Aesop (1818), ahapless angler is depicted standing in a swollen river desperatelytrying to free his line, which has caught on a branch in the fore-ground. The whole scene emphasizes the angler’s frustration, afeeling we have all experienced in similar circumstances.

Engravings from David Lank, Once-Upon-a-Tyne:The Angling Art and Philosophy of Thomas Bewick

(Montreal: The Antiquarian Press, 1977).

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20 THE AMERICAN FLY FISHER

These are but a few of the many vignettes depicting anglingthat Bewick has recorded in almost photographic detail.Although he did not invent wood engraving, he did make sev-eral innovations that helped to revive the process in favor ofcopperplate engraving. Wood engravers had traditionallyworked on the side or plank of the board, producing the linesof their illustrations by cutting away the background with aknife. Bewick himself used the end of the wood instead of theplank and a graver instead of a knife. These innovations result-ed in a fineness of detail and blocks of immense durability thathave been known to yield 900,000 prints without being wornout.

Shortly before he died on 8 November 1828, he was visitedby John James Audubon, the great American naturalist andartist, whose comments provide a fitting tribute to his genius.

My opinion of this remarkable man is, that he was purely a sonof nature, to whom alone he owed nearly all that characterizedhim as an artist and a man. Warm in his affections, of deep feel-ing, and possessed of a vigorous imagination, with correct andpenetrating observation, he needed little extraneous aid to makehim what he became, the first engraver on wood that Englandhas produced.10

Another fitting tribute appeared two years after his death.The naturalist William Yarrell recognized the beautiful Bewickswan as a separate species and named it after him.

"

ENDNOTES

1. Thomas Bewick, My Life, Iain Bain, ed. (London: The FolioSociety, 1981), 28. This is a new and retitled edition of A Memoir ofThomas Bewick written by Himself (Newcastle-upon-Tyne andLondon: Longman & Co., 1862), which was published posthumously.2. Ibid., 28–29.3. Ibid., 32.4. Ibid., 34.5. Ibid., 102.6. Ibid., 80.7. Ibid., 102.8. Ibid., 126.9. Ibid., 138.10. Ibid., 21.

Bewick’s swan (Cygnus bewickii).

From Thomas Bewick, The History of British Birds: WaterBirds (Newcastle, England: Edward Walker, 1804), 252.

Wilfried Berns

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FALL 2006 21

Pesca Andata (Gone Fishing)The museum hosted a reception for representatives of the

Italian Fly Fishing Federation and the Museo Internazionaledella Pesca a Mosca (International Museum of Fly Fishing inCastel di Sangro, Italy) on Thursday, May 25.

This contingent of Italian fly fishermen journeyed to theBatten Kill as part of a sister-city arrangement with Cambridge,New York, and a sister-river relationship, via Batten KillConservancy, between the Batten Kill and the Sangro River(known for great trout fishing). Among the guests arriving inManchester were Lino Alviani, art director of the museum;Osvaldo Galizia, president of the Italian Fly Fishing Federation,and his son Alessandro; and artist Alberto Coppini.

The museum took this opportunity to establish a sister-museum relationship with the museum in Castel di Sangro,Italy. Executive Director Bill Bullock presented the group withour own hardback copy of Treasury of Reels by Jim Brown, ourthirty-fifth anniversary poster, pins, patches, hats, journals,and other gifts, plus a certificate of mutual appreciation for ourshared vision of preserving fly-fishing history. The Italian visi-tors presented so many gifts to the museum that Bill was heardsaying, “This is just like Christmas!” We received two ancientRoman hooks displayed in a beautifully framed shadow boxdated approximately 300 A.D. and a phenomenal sculpted fishmade of metal mounted on a Plexiglas stand with its ribsshowing in relief. Our visitors also gave us a certificateacknowledging our sister-museum relationship, posters, mapsand guides of the Sangro River area, and a beautiful book onangling in Italy. The group took a tour of the museum withAdriano Manocchia, local artist, acting as interpreter.

Hearty refreshments were enjoyed. Many toasts were givento and received from our newfound friends, with sincere invi-

tations to visit them in Italy. Becky Nawrath, membershipdirector, and Sara Wilcox, art director, helped with the festivi-ties and thoroughly enjoyed our terrific visitors. As the after-noon turned into early evening, a group took to the pond forcasting demonstrations by Claudio Tosti (technical director forScuola Italiana di Pesca a Mosca [SIM]), while the rest enjoyedthe remaining refreshments at the picnic table. After manyhugs and kisses, our guests departed to their respective hostsfor the evening with a promise to fish the next day.

—REBECCA M. NAWRATH

Father’s Day EventOn Saturday, June 17, the American Museum of Fly Fishing

hosted a special Father’s Day event for fathers and their chil-dren and grandchildren to introduce them to the wonderfulsport of fly fishing. In conjunction with Fathertime, a localnonprofit run by Suzanne and George Meyers, the museuminvited local families to enjoy a morning of activity and artsand crafts, and to learn more about the excitement and histo-ry of fly fishing.

Twelve boys and girls joined their fathers and grandfathers.After a healthy breakfast at the museum, we formed twogroups representing the wild trout of the Batten Kill River. TheBrown Trout scurried to the pond, where they received expertcasting instruction from museum members and Casting forRecovery leaders Seline Skoug and Kate Fox. Kate and Selinedid a wonderful job with the kids, who swiftly began throwingtight loops on the museum’s pond. Meanwhile, the BrookTrout were treated to a guided tour of the museum’s Anglers’All exhibit with Collections Manager Yoshi Akiyama andExecutive Director Bill Bullock. The Brookies then repaired tothe library, where Membership Director Becky Nawrath intro-duced them to the delicate world of antique books. Using

Alex Zabik helps his son Marcus cast a fly rod duringthe museum’s Father’s Day gathering on June 17.

Yoshi Akiyama

AMFF Trustee Emeritus Buzz Eichel joins SIM TechnicalDirector Claudio Tosti and artist Alberto Coppinni from Italy

as they examine a museum display honoring Ernest Schwiebert.

Adriano Manocchia

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22 THE AMERICAN FLY FISHER

gloves to protect the books, each child learned how to proper-ly handle a book. The last indoor activity for the Brookies waslearning more about the wild trout of the Batten Kill and thencreating their own wild trout mobiles by painting woodentrout cutouts. Then, the Brookies headed out to the pond, andthe Browns headed inside. At the end of the day, each child wasthen given their own copy of James Prosek’s wonderful book,A Good Day’s Fishing.

The museum looks forward to repeating this event in 2007.Our sincere thanks to Suzanne and George Meyers ofFathertime, Seline Skoug and Kate Fox of Casting for Recovery(www.castingforrecovery.org), and the staff at the AMFF:Becky Nawrath, Yoshi Akiyama, and Doreen Richard.

Recent DonationsCollin M. Cunningham Jr. of the Tihonet Club, Dover,

Massachusetts, donated a collection of sixty-one artifacts andsixty-six books from the club, including artwork by Frank W.Benson (for a detailed list, contact the museum). This dona-tion was made possible by the hard work of museum friendGerald J. Karaska of Worcester, Massachusetts.

Dick Davis of Arlington, Vermont, donated original artdone by Charles DeFeo titled George Reed and Cains RiverBrute, 18 x 24 oil on canvas board (1967); a color photograph ofGeorge Reed and Charles DeFeo; and a shadow-box frame ofthree flies tied by Hallie Galaise.

Ted Juracsik and Tibor Reel Corporation of Delray Beach,Florida, donated a Billy Pate antireverse tarpon reel, no. 8,1975–1976, one of the first hundred Pate reels ever produced; aBilly Pate trout reel, no. 01, 1989, the very first trout productionmodel; a Billy Pate bonefish reel, which went through a boat fire;a Black Everglades reel, the original prototype, 1994; and a BigRiver reel, 1998, as a prototype for the Tibor Light Tailwater CL.

John S. Mackiewicz of Albany, New York, donated aRochester Reel Co. German Silver Fly Reel, 1920; a MuscovyNavijak fly reel, made in Czechoslovakia; an Olympia fly reel,made in India; and nine bags of magazines and catalogs.

Martin Sornborger of Barrington, Rhode Island, donateditems that belonged to Harold Gibbs, including thirty-two

books (contact the museum for a complete list of titles); twoletters to the Orvis Co. (24 July 1946 and 4 September 1946); abrochure for the Orvis Bakelite Impregnated and BakeliteCemented Rod; “The Tying of the Flies: Dame JulianaBerners,” by John McDonald & Dwight A. Webster, in the 27May 1957 Sports Illustrated; two copies of Harold NelsonGibbs’s biography; a copy of a newspaper article on HaroldGibbs; two original paintings of flies done by Austin Hogan; H.L. Leonard Rod Co. fishing tackle catalog; Darbee’s fly-tyingmaterial price list vol. 49; a magazine article about TheodoreGordon’s trout flies; and three letters from Carl Pickhardt toHarold Gibbs, c. 1967.

James Heckman of Manchester, Vermont, donated twoPennsylvania fishing license buttons; seven Yellow BreechesAnglers buttons; one Spring Creek project button; A Guide toCollecting Fishing & Hunting Licenses by Robert Miller; andAlfred A. Knopf ’s American Sportsman Treasury.

In the LibraryThanks to the following publishers (and author) for their

donations of recent titles that have become part of our collec-tion (all titles were published in 2006, unless otherwise noted):

Meadow Run Press sent us Ronald S. Swanson’s GrandCascapedia Giants. Stackpole Books sent us Pete Bodo’s TheTrout Whisperers and Rick Hafele’s Nymph-Fishing Rivers &Streams: A Biologist’s View of Taking Trout below the Surface.Frank Amato Publications, Inc. sent us Skip Morris’s Morris onTying Flies.

The Medlar Press sent us Clive Gammon’s Castaway (2005).And J. Keith Harwood sent us a copy of his The Hardy Book ofthe Salmon Fly, which he just published with Medlar Press.

Upcoming EventsOctober 27–28Membership/Board MeetingManchester, Vermont

NovemberDate TBDHartford Dinner and Sporting AuctionFarmington, Connecticut

January 19–21, 2007Fly-Fishing ShowMarlborough, Massachusetts

January 26–28, 2007Fly-Fishing ShowSomerset, New Jersey

Spring 2007 (dates TBD)New York Anglers’ Club Dinner and Sporting AuctionCleveland Dinner and Sporting Auction

For more information, contact the museum at(802) 362-3300 or via e-mail at [email protected].

BACK I S SU E S !Volume 6:Volume 7:Volume 8:Volume 9:

Volume 10:Volume 11:Volume 13:Volume 15:Volume 16:Volume 17:Volume 18:Volume 19:Volume 20:Volume 21:Volume 22:Volume 23:Volume 24:Volume 25:Volume 26:Volume 27:Volume 28:Volume 29:Volume 30:Volume 31:Volume 32:

Numbers 2, 3, 4Number 3Number 3Numbers 1, 2, 3Number 2Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4Number 3Number 2Numbers 1, 2, 3Numbers 1, 2, 3Numbers 1, 2, 4Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4Numbers 1, 2Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4Numbers 1, 2, 4Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4Numbers 1, 2, 3Numbers 1, 2, Numbers 1, 2, 3

Back issues are $4 a copy.To order, please contact Rebecca Nawrath at

(802)362-3300 or via e-mail at [email protected].

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I’m sure the outpouring of reminis-cences about “when I fished with/metErnie Schwiebert”—Ernesto, to me—since the Spring 2006 issue of theAmerican Fly Fisher hit the membershiphas been legion. Because I have been outof the fly-fishing loop temporarily, I onlylearned of his sudden passing when I raninto Bill Herrick at the supermarket sev-eral weeks ago. Most of his friends musthave had the same vacant stare of disbe-lief that I had, and the same mind full ofcoulda-dones and shoulda-dones con-cerning proper husbandry of Ernie’sfriendship. There was plenty of time, andmy life got in the way. Right now, thememories are bittersweet, but I’m surethey will soften eventually into fondness.

I first met Ernie at Fly Fishermanmagazine when it was located here inDorset and Don Zahner ran the show. Iwas a fly-fishing newbie whom DickFinlay took under his wing, made me myvery own 8-foot for a 6-weight, andshowed me how to present the fly fromthe banks of the Batten Kill at Johnson’sMeadow. Ernie was editor-at-large for the

magazine and was due to arrive in Dorsetlate one summer afternoon. We were allinvited to have drinks with Ernie at theBarrows House after the meeting. Erniehad just been featured in People maga-zine, and I was completely ga-ga at thethought of even being in the same townwith him, no less right at the same tableforcing small talk. Yikes! Of course, Erniewas charming, and my friend SuziDorgeloh and I strained to appear non-chalant.

As years passed, I stayed very involvedwith fly fishing, including two stints atthe museum, and I had the pleasure ofspending many grand times in Ernie’spresence. So brilliant—truly a renais-sance man. Once I contracted to type amanuscript for him about Iceland, andhis brain held a compendium of “allthings Iceland” that was truly daunting. Ihad typed many of his manuscriptsbefore, and the wealth of lore and knowl-edge I learned from them is still one ofmy references. I remember when theIceland tome arrived. Ernie wrote on legalpads—white, with no lines. And he

printed each word in capital letters. It’shard to think of Ernie without a manu-script page backdrop. He would tapethese pages to a wall and visually andphysically manipulate them until theirprogression felt natural. Then, he wouldtake them down in order and tape themtogether into a scroll! That’s what I typedfrom (pardon the dangling preposition,Ernesto).

The last time I saw Ernie was this pastfall at the museum. It had been a coupleof years since I had seen him, and he didlook a bit pale and frail. He lied to meabout his health, brushing his appear-ance away with some “just got over . . . ”fleeting ailment. I’m glad I gave him thatbig hug before I headed home later thatevening. The hug back? Priceless.

Thank you, museum staff, for thisissue of the American Fly Fisher. Readingit and thinking about Ernesto is my per-sonal tribute to a great and caring friend.

Paula “Stick” MorganArlington, Vermont

L E T T E R

I N M E M O R I A M

Bill Barrett—a popular, longtime sup-porter of the American Museum of FlyFishing, board member (1988–1996), for-mer treasurer (1992–1993), and vice pres-ident (1993–1995)—died peacefully May22 at the Lourdes-Noreen McKeenPavilion in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Bill was born in 1921, the son of Lois S.Barrett and Edmund E. Barrett of NewRochelle, New York. He was a graduateof Iona School and Georgetown Uni-versity, class of 1946. He served in theUnited States Army, 10th MountainDivision, during World War II. Followinghis military service, he joined the MeadCorporation in Dayton, Ohio, where hespent his entire career. He retired in 1986as vice president of the paper division.

Bill was an avid outdoor sportsman.No member of the Board of Trusteesever had a more upbeat spirit than thisexcellent fly fisherman. He loved golfand skiing, but fly fishing for salmon washigh on his list of pleasurable activities.He was a longtime member of the West-chester Country Club (Rye, New York),Ekwanok Country Club (Manchester,Vermont), and Loxahatchee Club (Jupiter,Florida). In recent years, he enjoyed hisgolf with the “Old Guard” at theBreakers in Palm Beach, Florida. He wasalso a member of the University Club,New York.

Bill was known as one of the friend-liest members of AMFF. The welcomemat was always out at his home in

Dorset. His art collection was second tonone, and he enjoyed in particular thedrawings and paintings of GeorgeShortmeier, whose work is still collectedthroughout the country. My wife, Phyllis,and I count Bill among the truest friendswe ever had.

He is survived by his sisters, LoisBrady of Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania,and Barbara Coughlin of Bronxville,New York. He was predeceased by his sis-ter Mary Hendrickson of Rye, New York,and his brother Edmund E. Barrett Jr. ofGrantham, New Hampshire.

Bill HerrickTrustee Emeritus

William Michael Barrett1921–2006

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24 THE AMERICAN FLY FISHER

Rhodes Baker is a retired attorney residing inDallas, Texas. “My writing these days is far lessprofitable but much more fun,” he says. “In July1896, my grandfather and a friend pedaled theirColumbia bicycles in an incredible long-distanceadventure trek across West Texas, camping and flyfishing along the way. I retraced some ancestraltracks with ‘Echoes from Yesteryear’ . . . a vicari-ous odyssey, so to speak.”

Previously published in Texas Sporting Journaland Persimmon Hill magazines, Baker says, “I alsocopyedit for some local, regional, and nationalmagazines. It helps keep me busy between fishingtrips.”

C O N T R I B U T O R S

J. Keith Harwood teaches Latin and Greek atClitheroe Royal Grammar School, an institutionfounded in 1554. He is a keen angler and fly dress-er and is very much interested in the history ofangling. He has contributed articles to a numberof magazines, and his book on the history of thefloat (bobber), The Float, was published in 2003.He has just completed a book on the history ofsalmon flies, The Hardy Book of Salmon Flies,which was published by the Medlar Press in July2006. His article “The Ramsbottoms: Piscicul-turists, Tackle Manufacturers, and Fly Dressers”appeared in the Fall 2001 issue of this journal.

A fly fisher since 1956, Connecticut nativeRobert DeMott is Edwin and Ruth KennedyDistinguished Professor of American Literatureat Ohio University, where he has taught since1969. His edition of John Steinbeck’s WorkingDays: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath,1938–1941 was a New York Times Notable Book in1989. Steinbeck’s Typewriter: Essays on His Artreceived the Nancy Dasher Book Award from theCollege English Association of Ohio in 1998, andThe Weather in Athens was a co-winner of the2002 Ohioana Library Award in poetry. An FFFcasting instructor and member of West Virginia’sBlennerhassett Chapter of Trout Unlimited,DeMott has published in Fly Fisherman, Gray’sSporting Journal, Yale Anglers’ Journal, Trout, andAmerican Angler. He lives in Athens, Ohio, and isreachable at [email protected].

Fred C. Tom

Jon Ward-Allen

Marion Baker

DONORBRICKSAn opportunityto make a difference andbecome part of the newhome of the AmericanMuseum of Fly Fishing.

Bricks are $100 each.

Bricks may be purchased singly or in a series that can be placed together

to create a larger message.

Purchasers are free to put anything they like on their

bricks (no profanity).

Each brick is 4" x 8" and has room for three lines oftext of up to 20 characters per line. That does includespaces and punctuation— for example, putting “fly fishing rules!” on a brick would be 18 characters.

Call (802) 362-3300

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THIS JULY HAS BEEN especially warm and unstable, withlots of rain making the Batten Kill almost unfishable.With this in mind, I decided to return to one of my

favorite fishing spots, the West Branch of the Penobscot River,near Baxter State Park in northern Maine. I called my brother-in-law to see if I could persuade him to join me on a climb upMaine’s tallest peak, Mount Katahdin, and do some fly fishingfor one of the greatest game fish on the fly, Maine’s wild Salmosebago. After some negotiating, he agreed, and we aptly namedour journey the 2006 Surf and Turf.

Having grown up in Bangor, this was familiar country tome, and I was excited to introduce Kit to this rugged place. Hehad never seen Katahdin nor fished for Maine’s brook trout orlandlocked salmon. Luckily, Kit had also read Henry DavidThoreau’s Maine Woods in college, so we had lots to talk aboutduring our eight-hour ride to Caribou Lake.

I am always amazed by the myriad connections that Mainehas to the history of our sport. Hiram Leonard opened his rod-making shop in Bangor, where sports from all over the UnitedStates were flocking to chase Atlantic salmon at the BangorSalmon Pool. Bangor was the crossroads for accessing theGreat North Woods, and the Penobscot River served as thegreatest highway to access the sporting opportunities availableto those hearty souls. Teddy Roosevelt visited Bangor on sev-eral occasions on his way north to fish and hunt theMattawamkeag and Penobscot region.

When I returned from the trip, I dove back into my dog-eared copy of Thoreau’s journal to both reconnect to his routeand search for specific fishing references that might connectback to our collection. I found this passage, which I cherish:

In the night I dreamed of trout-fishing; and, when at length Iawoke, it seemed a fable that this painted fish swam there sonear my couch, and rose to our hooks the last evening, and Idoubted if I had not dreamed it all. So I arose before dawn totest its truth, while my companions were still sleeping. Therestood Ktaadn with distinct and cloudless outline in the moon-light; and the rippling of the rapids was the only sound to breakthe stillness. Standing on the shore, I once more cast my lineinto the stream, and found the dream to be real and the fabletrue. The speckled trout and silvery roach, like flying-fish, spedswiftly through the moonlight air, describing bright arcs on thedark side of Ktaadn, until moonlight, now fading into daylight,brought satiety to my mind, and the minds of my companions,who had joined me.1

Although Kit and I did not encounter the “silvery roach”(most likely whitefish or chubs), we did catch several speckledjewels (wild Maine brook trout) and had excellent fishing forone of the few original remaining wild strains of Salmo sebago.I cannot help but think that the brook trout and salmon wereleased that evening were directly descended from the samefish Thoreau describes in his journals. How lucky we are to beconnected through fishing to the words of this eloquent,adventurous philosopher.

BILL BULLOCKEXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

1Henry David Thoreau, “Ktaadn” (1848), which appeared in The MaineWoods (1864), which is included in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), vol. 3, 91–92.

Thoreau’s Maine Woodsand Maine Fishing

Mount Katahdin from Togue Pond.Photo from V. R. Ludgate, “Katahdin, Sentinel of the North Woods,”

The Regional Review, vol. I, no. 3, September 1938.

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The American Museumof Fly Fishing

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THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF FLY FISHING,a nationally accredited, nonprofit, educa-tional institution dedicated to preservingthe rich heritage of fly fishing, was found-ed in Manchester, Vermont, in 1968. Themuseum serves as a repository for, andconservator to, the world’s largest collec-tion of angling and angling-related objects.The museum’s collections and exhibitsprovide the public with thorough docu-mentation of the evolution of fly fishingas a sport, art form, craft, and industry inthe United States and abroad from thesixteenth century to the present. Rods,reels, and flies, as well as tackle, art, books,manuscripts, and photographs, form themajor components of the museum’s col-lections.

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